The Foundation Beyond Belief is a new organization designed to direct charitable contributions towards atheist/humanist projects. Okay, well not all of them need involve reaching towards atheist goals, but humanist ones. My pet project is The Beagle Project Foundation, which I promoted to a nauseating level of noise at Tangled up in Blue Guy. The project is a good example of the mission of the Foundation Beyond Belief.

Our Mission: To demonstrate humanism at its best by supporting efforts to improve this world and this life; to challenge humanists to embody the highest principles of humanism, including mutual care and responsibility; and to help and encourage humanist parents to raise confident children with open minds and compassionate hearts.

Today is the first day of the Blog Bonanza for the Foundation Beyond Belief. Please consider joining Dale McGowan and help to select worthy, humanist causes.

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?

I do well on tests.  Someone early in my life clued me in on the secret to standardized testing, and I think that most people now know the formula:

1. Look at the answer choices, then read the question.
2. Eliminate the two obviously wrong answers.
3. Analyze the two remaining answers to determine the most probable correct answer.

Having learned this, and by being able to read at a level that was scored five or six years advanced of whatever age I was, I was able to convince teachers and those around me that I was exceptionally intelligent.

I wish I hadn’t done that.  I wish I hadn’t convinced my teachers and parents that I was smarter than all the rest.  I wish I had spent more time actually learning and studying and working hard than trying to show off to people.  I didn’t master the materials.  I mastered demonstrating mastery, and I have since learned the difference.  My mother told me later that she had made the same mistake.  She did well on standardized testing and scored “145″ on the Stanford-Binet assessment.  While this may mean that she was smarter than Obama, it also led her to study to do well on tests while not mastering the materials.

She was praised for doing so well on the tests.  She earned As all the way through high school.  I have seen her report cards, and she received praise from all her teachers and from her parents.  But she was frustrated, because she would rather have taken the time to learn the workings of the cell and how biologists knew what they knew.  She would rather have spent more time applying maths to things that she wanted to do with them.  She would rather have retained her knowledge beyond the most recent test rather than rush off to prepare for the next test.  She would rather have taken her time learning.

She didn’t finish a four-year degree.  She earned a two-year degree and passed her certification to be a teacher in the public school system.  She loved her job as a teacher and reluctantly gave it up to be a stay-at-home mother to four kids.  ((I was the 5th of 7 and she had left teaching full time just before my twin sister and I were conceived.))  When we were old enough, she entered continuing education, but when she died two years ago she had yet to finish her bachelor’s degree.  Her lack of a degree was not a measure of her intelligence any more than her score in the Stanford-Binet.

She told me all this one night just after I dropped out of college.  She was upset that I hadn’t talked to her about it first and shared her reasoning.  Her bachelor’s was the one goal that she had yet to achieve and she regretted that she hadn’t yet walked down the aisle at a commencement ceremony.  She never gave up the idea, because she knew that she was intelligent and she believed that she was letting herself down by not living up to her potential.  She didn’t want to see this happen to me, and here I am always just inches away from a bachelor’s degree in something.

Whenever results from the standardized test such as the Iowa Basics came back, it turned out that I had scored in the 99th percentile, so the teachers always cut me more slack than they did the other kids in elementary school.  If I hadn’t finished a math, spelling or reading assignment, the teachers would give me extra time because they assumed that I had been busy reading a dictionary or an encyclopedia instead.  They were justified in thinking so, because that was often the case.  I learned to coast through school without getting caught or warned or straightened out by the teachers in charge of me.  I can’t completely fault them; they wanted to make sure that the “less intelligent” pupils received the attention that they thought I didn’t need so badly.  I learned to coast because I was not held accountable for effort.

I also learned that the values pupils and students placed on their peers was related at various stages to their perceived intelligence.  In elementary school, I was valued by my peers for being smart, but that changed as I moved into junior and senior high school.  These were the ages when athleticism was more valued than intelligence.  I lost my status because I was most definitely not very athletic.  Yes, in sixth grade basketball I had helped my team win the intramural championship, but this was mostly because I was taller than the other sixth graders and was able to get the occasional lucky tip to a teammate who always seemed to be in the right place.  In seventh grade, the other guys grew beyond me and I was never better than a second-stringer.  In the meantime, my smarts were not important except that my classmates always wanted to sit next to me so that they could read my answers and cheat.

I was being used by them. To get away from that, I started playing down the fact that I was “smarter than the rest” among my peers in hoping to gain acceptance.  It never worked, and I found myself becoming less and less popular and having few friends in school.  In retrospect, I should have done what I wanted and spent my after-school time in the science lab doing extra work and digging into the ways to answer the questions that were not being answered in the textbooks.  I should have done extra data collection and analysis.  I would have served me well and I would have been more excited about actually doing science than reading about what other people were doing in science.  I treated it too much like a spectator sport, I think.

I still treat science as a spectator sport.  I am fascinated by the results of scientific exploration, study and analysis.  I read it voraciously, even though I usually have to skip over most of the details of published papers to get to an understanding of what the authors either demonstrated or disproved.  I want to understand and know the details as to how they arrived at their results but get frustrated that I only know experimental design and methodology up to a certain level of comprehension. I don’t have a strong enough understanding to read through the literature reviews that helped them shape their studies and so, when all is said and done, I ultimately am put in the position when reading a published paper of having to “trust” the authors and reviewers to have done the work properly to justify those results.

When learning more and more about skepticality and how it works, I hate having to “trust” at the level that would give me the confidence that the results and abstracts are accurate reflections of the dataset and variable interactions.  The reason I get frustrated is because I have learned that they can make mistakes and still get published in peer-reviewed works, which is why they publish.  Their results are read, analyzed and retested by yet another set of researchers who know how to approach problem-solving in that area.

One of the most crucial scientific issues that we face today is the effect of anthropogenic global warming.  I am at a level of understanding in this issue that is hardly any more advanced than the rest of the general public.  I read popular articles on the subject, I read realclimate.org, I read Tim Lambert’s Deltoid, I read James Hrynshyn’s The Island of Doubt, and I read Greg’s series on AGW each time he republishes it.  I think I understand the issue more each time I do this, but I am still left in a position of trust on their explanations because I am not a climatologist.  I trust these writers and explainers, but as a skeptic, I still have to hold back on complete acceptance because I don’t have the skill and background to sufficiently analyze what is going on.  I do trust the people I refer to here, but it doesn’t give me the degree of certainty that makes me satisfied that I am able to defend completely the conclusions that are presented to me except as scientific consensus.

In the meantime, I am thinking of how stupid it was for me to make an emotional and irrational decision to leave college when I did. It was a decision that I can’t undo, and I can only try to finish what I started.  I realize that if I hadn’t done so, then I would be able to be more fully confident in what I read about scientific issues, or perhaps I would actually be participating in the study.

So, what happened?  When I got to college, I realized that I couldn’t “coast.”  The professors and evaluators hadn’t seen my standardized test results, and if they had they wouldn’t have cared.  They wanted me to demonstrate more than a good casual understanding of the material.  They wanted me to demonstrate not that I had accepted their lectures, but that I had mastered the process that they were teaching me.

In my first foray back to the university world following the dropout, I studied experimental psychology at North Dakota State University in Fargo.  I had previously taken classes in statistics and analysis at the Psych 200 levels, and as a result the first two weeks of the course were largely review of materials I understood very well.  I earned an A+ on the first exam.  I was proud of that, but then I coasted in that class while concentrating on others and working at a restaurant 60+ hours per week.  I ended up failing the class, because I couldn’t write the paper for the final grade.

There are some clues now as to what may happen to pupils who are praised in their early education for their intelligence, and they indicate to me that I may not be alone among people who have a great capacity to learn and understand but haven’t lived up to their potential.  A study published in 2007 shows that pupils who are praised for their ability follow with decreasing effort and subsequent testing reveals that they didn’t concentrate on mastering the subject material. There is a good article on the study in the New York Magazine:

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

And I do tend to avoid doing things that I may fail in, and have to push myself in order to “jump in.”  Dweck adds to her point in this Q&A in Education World:

EW: Some students see intelligence as a fixed characteristic; it is a quality that people are born with and little can be done to change it. Others hold a more changeable view of intelligence; they think most anyone can learn new things and “stretch” their intelligence. Clearly, it seems that students with a changeable view of intelligence might fare better when faced with a learning challenge. But can anything be done to change those students who have a fixed view of their intelligence so that they might do better when facing a challenging learning task?

Dweck: You’re right. Students who believe that intelligence is a potential that they can develop do fare better when faced with challenge. For example, they often blossom across a challenging school transition when their fellow students with the fixed view are busy doubting themselves and losing their edge.

We have found with students of all ages, from early grade school through college, that the changeable view can be taught. Students can be taught that their intellectual skills are things that can be cultivated — through their hard work, reading, education, confronting of challenges, etc. When they are taught this, they seem naturally to become more eager for challenges, harder working, and more able to cope with obstacles. Researchers (for example, Joshua Aronson of the University of Texas) have even shown that college students’ grade point averages go up when they are taught that intelligence can be developed.

It is interesting to me that these beliefs about intelligence seem to be fairly stable individual differences when left to themselves. But they also can be changed fairly readily when students are confronted with the alternative view in an explicit and compelling way.

Further, I have found in working with my own kids on their homework that I don’t have the patience to be a teacher.  Since I grasped many of the things they work on rather quickly, I expect them to do the same when they approach new problems and assignments.  I assume that they are wanting me to do the work for them, because they look to me to provide the answers.  When they can’t, I have found myself getting angry at them for not trying hard enough.  I seem to place the same value on the idea of “fixed intelligence” that my teachers and parents placed on me.  Their mother forbade my helping my oldest daughter with homework when she was in 4th grade and struggling with pre-algebra arrays. I saw and worked with the patterns as soon as she showed them to me, and I tried to explain as well as I could, but when she still didn’t understand how to work with them, I got angry and yelled at her.  It was not a proud moment.

Intelligence is complex set of values, and it certainly can not be determined through design and application of  multiple choice exams. Neither can it be applied across cultures and experiential norms without careful definition of what “intelligence” is when it is measured.  On Monday, Stephanie posted a series of links to articles and discussions of the psychological implications and measurements of intelligence and they are written for those of us who don’t have advanced experience in the field. I encourage readers to go back to look at them and read them.  Also check out the great discussion that followed in the comments.

In my experience, the label was detrimental.  I got by even though I was lazy.  My sister, labeled as less intelligent than I, graduated Summa Cum Laude and went on to a Master’s degree.  I am proud of her, because she achieved through effort.  She hated that she had to work so hard while I skated by, but now look.

My IQ from one test I took as a college student seems to be 145.  The same score as my mother.  Barack Obama’s has been reported as 142.  I am, then, smarter than him.  He is now President of the United States, and I work in a phone bank.  I can’t conclude that I am “smarter than the rest.”

But at the same time, people will excuse what may be dumb decisions for what are clearly dumb reasons. Here in Minnesota, as I write this, we are expecting a significant snowstorm. This is the sort of storm that, I think, reasonably makes one question whether or not to change one’s plans. Does one really want to go across town for a few hours then back during the storm of the century? But a snowstorm maybe an inconvenience, and for some, it is better to be in denial of inconveniences.

So a couple of days ago I said to someone who I know has plans for Christmas day, “You may have to skip your plans, with this snowstorm coming. I hear there may be a foot or so of snow.”

The response: “There shouldn’t be a problem. They had 20 inches in D.C. We’ll be fine.”

Huh. So does this mean that if they had 40 inches in D.C. that we would be okay with, say, 34 inches? Interesting.

Then, the next day, as the storm we are about to have was getting closer and started to look like it might be even more severe than earlier thought, I said to a different person, who has Christmas Eve and Christmas plans, “So, you may have to cancel your plans. There’s a big storm coming.”

“Yeah, but there shouldn’t be a problem. I hear some of it is going to be sleet. The more sleet, the less snow.”

Huh. So, instead of fluffy snow, we could get ice. And the sleet is going to fall, but in Iowa. So we could have two feet of snow with 25-foot drifts, and as long as its sleeting in Iowa, we’re okay?

Now, something you must understand is that here in Minnesota, we don’t get much snow. Minnesotans THINK they get lots of snow, because Minnesota is thought of as a wintry state. But the snowfall here is moderate, not great, in a typical year. What we do get here is wind and cold. But not so much snow.

In fact, if Minnesota were snowy, and Minnesotans could handle that, it would be hard to explain the 400 or so accidents that happen on the Twin Cities highways every time it snows (more for the first snow of the season).

But there was this one storm that everyone remembers. The day the sky fell on Minnesota. It was Halloween of 1991, and between one and three feet of snow fell in the impacted areas. The storm killed 22 people. Whenever the issue of snow comes up, the Minnesotans in the room wait patiently for the opportunity to mention the Halloween storm. It is as much part of the Minnesota Mythology as the Virgin Birth is of Christian Mythology. The Halloween storm.

So today, some people were talking about the storm.

“We could get quite a wallop from this storm that’s coming,” said one person.

“Yeah, might have to cancel Christmas!” added another.

“Right, like that’s going to happen,” noted a third.

“Nothing like the Halloween storm, that’s for sure,” said the first.

“Oh, yeah, I remember that one…” said the second.

“Hey, we’re Minnesotans! We can handle a little snow!” said the first.

“You betcha,” said the third.

“Oh, listen, the weather report is on the radio.”

” …the 46 to 60 hour long snow storm may turn out to be similar to the Halloween storm of 1991…”

“Oh…” said they all.

Pale faces became paler. You could hear the ticking in the heads. People thinking about their plans.

So, I’m going to go to the grocery store and stock up on supplies. Then we’re going to spend the next couple of days watching the baby burp and stuff.

Merry Christmas.

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.

Trish sent us this post in May and, perhaps because of her appearance in Quiche Moraine, the BBC contacted her to discuss the history of Northwestern Minnesota, Southern Manitoba and Northeastern North Dakota on their Pods and Blogs show.  She writes the blog St. Vincent Memories. St. Vincent is a small town across the Red River from Pembina, North Dakota, just across the Canadian border from Emerson, Manitoba.  I find the subject fascinating because she shares a history of which I was completely unaware even though I grew up in the same area.  Hallock is only 20 miles from the “Tri-City” area she writes about.

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by the producer of BBC Radio Five’s Pods & Blogs show. The producer, Jamillah Knowles, had been alerted to this blog by a friend of hers recently. Jamillah was doing a program on history blogs, and she wanted to feature mine on that program. As you might imagine, I was flabbergasted but highly honored. I said yes!

Follow her link to the podcast from this post at St. Vincent Memories, “Interview with the BBC.”

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.

The cooking of food had a major impact on human evolution, thanks in large part to innovations and activities by females of our species. The invention of cooking transformed most environments on this planet into habitable ones. Anthropologist and popular science blogger Greg Laden explores the role of food and cooking in shaping our species and its evolutionary success.

Bell Museum

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?