What to do with opposing views?
Two months ago Dr. Steven Novella, who writes at NeuroLogicaBlog, was invited to be an expert on an acupuncture debate, and directed readers of his blog there to see more and comment. I followed his link and found Opposing Views, a website that hosts debates between experts in the topics debated, and allows readers to comment on individual arguments as well as the broader questions.
There are quite a few debates there that I think readers of this site would be interested in. If debunking pseudoscience is your thing, check out Are Autism and Vaccines Linked? or Does Intelligent Design Have Merit? The more religiously (or irreligiously) opinionated of you might want to take part in Should Religious Symbols be Displayed on Public Property? or even the more fundamental Is There a God? There are of course the classic debates on same-sex marriage and the electoral college, and many others. What’s really nice about the format is that they have verified experts representing their respective sides. While I can’t exactly say I’d vouch for the credibility of some of them (for example, the Discovery Institute), they certainly are experts in whatever it is they’re defending. No one can pout later about how their side was unfairly represented by someone who was unprepared and ill-informed.
So, I’ve been hanging around there for a while, commenting to point out nerdy things like post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies and trying to engage people in intellectual discussion. I like it, but sometimes I wonder if I’m caught in a bit of a “someone is wrong on the internet” trap. (If these crazy people are on a debate website, I think to myself, surely they want someone to explain to them how they’re being irrational. Four hours later….) Incredibly, the site management does moderate comments. They’re successful at weeding out the YouTube sunshine, but they can’t exactly cull all the stupid ones because that would often introduce a pretty strong bias with respect to a particular debate.
Another reservation I have is that it’s tricky to pick truly debatable topics, and to phrase the questions in ways that facilitate debate with actual clash. Consequently, some of the dialogue gets more frustrating than it really needs to be. Should We Recycle? is actually about whether recycling should be government-mandated or market-driven. Both experts in Should Prayer Be Allowed in Public Schools? ended up agreeing that there’s no problem with students who choose to pray on their own in a non-disruptive way, although many of the commenters (and probably many of the users voting in the poll) didn’t get the memo.
Perhaps more important, however, is an issue about debate philosophy that I’ve struggled with for some time. Is it better to challenge ridiculous opinions out in the open, and let them either flourish or die in the marketplace of ideas, or should we instead refuse to dignify certain viewpoints with a formal recognition such as a debate? Some beliefs are so ludicrous that even agreeing to debate them gives them more credit than they’re due. On the other hand, if any meaningful number of people did hold such beliefs, it would be pretty scary — the kind of thing you might want to take action against. (Would you waste an hour trying to convince an audience not to listen to the Timecube guy? Probably not, unless there actually was an auditorium full of Timecube believers. In that case, I might be tempted to spend a lot more than an hour, if I didn’t run screaming.) A few of the questions on Opposing Views are pretty clear examples of this type of gray area. Are Generic Drugs as Effective as Name Brands? Yes. Yes, they are, because they’re chemically identical. There are also the cases where it’s not so much that one side is definitionally correct, but that anyone who’s devoted some intelligent thought to the matter reaches the same conclusion. Debates like those are harder to pinpoint, but they’re the ones I referred to before, in which eliminating the vapid comments would leave the thread sounding pretty one-sided. Is that debate really worth it, or is it making the struggle to educate and convince people even harder?
I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but I believe they’re worth thinking about and trying to answer. In the meantime, I’ll be around on Opposing Views, and for purely selfish reasons, I hope some of you will be too. There are these structural and philosophical difficulties that may or may not ever be overcome, but I still hate to see someone be both wrong and unchallenged on the internet. (More than 80% of responding users think that acupuncture works, despite the studies that have shown pretend acupuncture to be more effective than the real thing.) If some of you are there with me, we can make a dent in some of those poll results, and fill the comment threads with some higher-level critical analysis. At least for now, I’m naive enough to believe that it makes a difference.
Who can be my president?
I’ve been mulling over the proposal, from our friend Progressive Conservative, that we all take and publicize the Wendell Wilkie Pledge. He’s named it for the Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkie’s “Loyal Opposition Speech” is a reminder that politics is about choosing the best policies rather than about personality clashes, and that one can continue to oppose a party’s or politician’s ideas while respecting the rule of law and authority of the office held. In his explanation of the pledge, he writes:
When we vote we are making a promise. A promise to honor the results. A promise to honor the office. A promise to claim the president as our own, even when we disagree with him most. That is the oath I ask you all to take. I urge you to accept the results of this election. Regardless of who you vote for in November, our country can only go forward if we give our new president our loyal support, though I am not asking anyone to blindly follow this President.
I like this idea very much, and I wish that I was writing this post to affirm my support for the pledge and call on others to join me. However, I think the circumstances of this election make that impossible for me to do. I personally support the Obama-Biden ticket, and I would of course honor the results even if the McCain-Palin ticket were to win instead, but I don’t think I could wholeheartedly refer to McCain as “my president” when he and his campaign have gone so far out of their way to specify that they are absolutely no such thing.
I confess: I’ve finished college, and I’m a graduate student. In physics. I don’t live in a tiny town in a landlocked state; I live in a big city, near a coast. (Horror of horrors — the one on the east!) I’m not a Christian. I don’t even believe in a god. Because I’m an educated, metropolitan, “East-coast liberal” atheist, John McCain and Sarah Palin are willing to demonize me and others like me in an attempt to win the votes of everyone else. Why should I pledge my loyal support to a ticket that charges me with the problems of our time?
This hateful rhetoric is not new to Palin, though she did recently refer explicitly to “real America” and “the pro-America parts” of the country. Her speech at the RNC was all about how small-town people are good people (and not-so-subtle implications that if you don’t meet the Mayberry R.F.D. stereotype, you don’t really love your country). I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the irony meter-breaking RNC speech delivered by Mitt Romney, who ripped on “Eastern elites” despite being one himself. Just recently, McCain campaign adviser Nancy Pfotenauer dismissed northern Virginia as not “real Virginia,” but merely infiltrated and contaminated by “Democrats [who] have just come in from the District of Columbia.” North Carolina representative Robin Hayes told a McCain rally that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” Today, McCain explained to NBC’s Brian Williams that the “elitists” live “in our nation’s capital and New York City.” (In the same interview, Palin pointed out that an elitist is anyone “who [thinks] that they’re better than anyone else,” which puts an interesting new twist on the concept of a political campaign.)
Can you imagine what would happen if Obama and Biden were campaigning in the same way? What if they repeatedly warned of what “conservatives from fly-over states” would do to the government? What if they promised to rid Washington of “Texas bigotry,” or “backwater Mississippi racism,” or “evangelical Christian ignorance?” What if when Republicans derisively referred to Obama’s Ivy League education, Democrats countered by pointing out that McCain graduated 894th of 899 in his college class, and that the best of the four colleges Palin transferred around between was the University of Idaho? I’d love to see each use of the adjective “latte-drinking” as an insult followed by a reminder that the McCain-Palin ticket is instead targeting the alcoholic demographic. Imagine if they argued, as Adam Cadre did not too long ago, that “Republican political ads spew insults — or at least epithets that Republicans think are insults — while Democrats hold out their hands and coo that ‘There is no them — there is only us.’ There’s a reason the guy who said that moved to New York after his presidency instead of back to Arkansas: New York is better than Arkansas.”
Of course, this would be outrageous. The media wouldn’t let the Democrats get away with a presidential campaign with that kind of language in it, and neither would the voters. Even though many of us do believe, deep down, that there’s something seriously wrong with states where creationism is taught in science classes, or where racial segregation is still the norm, or where everything from terrorism to hurricanes gets blamed on “the gays,” we believe that it would be both rude and unproductive to accuse everyone in an entire region of being blindingly ignorant or racist or bigoted as part of a campaign. A candidate willing to make such sweeping and divisive generalizations would be difficult to vote for, even if there were some truth behind them.
It feels like many eons ago now, but there was this time back in April when Obama, at a closed fundraiser event in California, commented that some Pennsylvanians were “bitter” about the government and the economy and as a result “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s a reasonable characterization of what’s going on, and while it’s not something anyone would be happy to hear said about themselves, it doesn’t seem particularly vicious. I could even see it as sympathetic. But when his comments got out, the only words anyone remembered were “cling to guns and religion” which was interpreted to mean that Obama wants to repeal the Second Amendment and ban God. Obama backtracked, calling his statement “boneheaded.”
So then, why is it acceptable, even encouraged, for Republicans to make much worse comments in the opposite direction? I’ll set aside the obvious fallacy of assuming that everyone in New England is a liberal or that everyone in the Deep South is conservative. While that is insulting to our intelligence, it’s at least statistically likely to be true. My bigger problem here is with the divide between the supposedly good Americans and supposedly bad Americans. Republicans seem to think that the good Americans live in the small towns, with limited education, limited exposure to other countries or cultures or ways of life, and limited sobriety. They all work in manufacturing or construction or farming, and this is good, honest work. They all live in “real America,” the states or districts that are colored red on electoral maps. On the other hand, there are the bad Americans, who live in cities big enough to have more traffic lights than you can count on your fingers, tend to go to college and occasionally travel abroad, and have a wide variety of ethnic background and religious traditions. As a result of their college education, they have bad jobs in fields like law, journalism, or scientific research, which means they live in an elite Ivory Tower where they scheme about ways to ruin the lives of good Americans. Naturally, they do not live in “real America,” because their states or districts get colored in blue.
I wish I was making all this up. I wish I could honestly say that we can all get along, but I didn’t make this divide — I usually speak out against it. But when the demonization has gone so far that we appear to have a new Joe McCarthy in Congress, I think it’s gone beyond what I can handle in personal conversations. Republicans need to stop talking about who’s “pro-America” or “anti-America,” who lives in “real America” and who doesn’t. We all love our country; we just have different ideas on how to keep it great and make it better. If Republicans continue to characterize any and all opposing viewpoints as “anti-American,” I don’t see why anyone should be willing to be their “loyal opposition” providing respectful and reasoned debate. Unless John McCain and Sarah Palin suddenly decide to vehemently denounce this kind of rhetoric and seriously apologize for the tone of their campaign and the direction in which they’ve led their party, I just can’t see being able to call McCain “my president.”
Dancing about architecture
Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” What a great image. While I’m not sure that I agree with him, I do think that a similar thing could be truthfully said about popular science. Writing about science is often just as effective as dancing about architecture, although it’s hardly a stupid thing to want to do well.
I used to enjoy reading, listening to, or watching reports on science for a general audience. That was back when I was still part of the general audience. Once I began to study physics at the university level, I realized how empty most of those reports really are. The conventional wisdom says that they have to be, since most people don’t have enough background knowledge to process most of the content. You can’t talk about Lorentz invariant quantities, since most of your audience thinks a matrix is a place without spoons, and will tell you to just relax if you mention a tensor. Obviously you can’t get that technical.
Still, I really can’t stand seeing all those books that claim to explain some scientific concept “with no equations at all!” or “made simple for everyone” or some similar promise. There are lots of them. Even Einstein wrote one on relativity subtitled “A Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand.” Yeah, right. Einstein was a great writer and a clear thinker and all that, but maybe it’s okay to admit that your audience is not really “anyone” and “everyone.” It would be nice if everyone really could understand relativity, but either not everyone can understand it, or you’re not really explaining relativity (you’re just dancing about architecture, as it were).
I’m all for improving science literacy. Don’t get me wrong. I just think that science literacy would be better served by being willing to communicate how complex the scientific process is, rather than smoothing everything over and pretending no math was involved. If all you know about string theory is the animation of a donut and coffee cup morphing into each other (illustrating their topological equivalence), as was shown over and over and over again in that PBS Nova special, it’s hard to imagine why string theory is hard. What are string theorists doing all day? Staring at coffee cups and playing cellos? Of course it’s not worth funding them — being in academia is easy street! …Even if people intellectually acknowledge that math is involved in science, the sugar-coated version of science presented in popular media still downplays the reality of the scientific method: it’s a long process of theory, experiment, data analysis, comparison with theory, and back-to-the-drawing-board. Depicting science as something reducible to sound bites and cute animations ultimately harms science literacy rather than helping it. It also encourages people who have dismissed the entire field of mathematics as not worth their time, since it implies you can understand science while being bad at math.
I don’t blame the science reporters for this. Some of them have almost no science background themselves, and are presenting the analogies and handwaving that felt like an effective explanation when they heard it. Most of the reporters that do have science background have editors who don’t. Nevertheless, in an ideal world I would hope that science writers stop billing their works as math-free, and stop asking Nobel Prize-winners to explain their research in a mere sentence or two. Dumbing down the reporting doesn’t help us appreciate the intelligence behind what’s reported on.
Pandering to the stupid
I wanted to write something in response to the vice presidential debates last week, but I didn’t have much to say about the actual content, and just kept returning to an almost impossible to articulate sense of revulsion. (I’m sure a lot of people feel that after listening to Sarah Palin, though.) Watching news coverage and SNL clips over the weekend, I began to hear the cause loud and clear. In the debate, Palin said, “One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again.” (Well, maybe not so clear, but still.) Joe Six Pack. She’s saying that in order to get “average people” on her side.
Hockey moms, I can understand. It sounds a little less trite than “soccer moms,” and it reminds everyone just how tough people are in Alaska. They’ll take a body check over a slide tackle any day, you betcha. But “Joe Six Pack” — I almost can’t believe it. Wasn’t that a derisive term, not so very long ago? Urban Dictionary defines it as “Average American moron, IQ 60.” Webster’s explains the etymology as “from average ‘Joe’ watching TV with a six-pack of beer” and points out the usage is “derogatory slang.” The term is found in the Wikipedia entry on John Q. Public, which notes that “Roughly equivalent, but more pejorative, are the names Joe Six-pack, Joe Blow, and Joe Schmoe….” We’re talking about a person whose defining qualities are a beer in hand and a low IQ. Is the McCain-Palin ticket actively trying to paint this picture of their supporters — and of typical Americans?
It’s not just about the general public, either. On conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt’s program, Palin recently declared, “It’s time that [a] normal Joe Six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that’s kind of taken some people off guard… we put government back on the side of the people of Joe Six-pack like me….” We’re supposed to be voting for the McCain-Palin ticket because Palin is herself a Joe Six-pack. Do they even know what this term means?
Maybe people really are identifying with this rhetoric. But let’s not encourage them, please! Low intelligence and perpetual inebriation should not be glorified, and should certainly not be held up as desirable qualities in a politician. Americans working blue-collar jobs — well, really all Americans, since this is about us everyday, regular folks, and who isn’t? — should be insulted when they are described in this way by someone purporting to represent them and their interests. It’s belittling; it’s basically a synonym for stupid.
Even if you are intellectually disengaged and proud of it, you should at least be able to acknowledge that in order to have a functioning government, your leaders should be slightly more informed and engaged than you are. Politicians who call you stupid probably shouldn’t earn your vote. But a politician who brags about being just as stupid as you? That should really be a no-brainer.
Separation of church and politics
A week ago, a group of ministers supported by the Alliance Defense Fund (which, by the way, is every bit as idiotic as the vagueness of its name would imply) made political endorsements in their sermons as part of the “Pulpit Initiative”. This is something they’re not allowed to do under the regulations that come with their tax-exempt status. The goal is to create a test case with the standing to challenge the constitutionality of that regulation.
I should say, first of all, that they have a legitimate argument, and I don’t believe the lawyers involved should be punished. Yes, the lawyers told their clients to break the law, but with standing requirements what they are, this kind of thing is common in the US when people want to challenge laws. That’s maybe unfortunate, but as long as the lawyers made very clear to these pastors what it was they were getting themselves into, I have no ethical complaint against them.
That said, it’s pretty clear to me that there is no ground for their suit. Churches are in no way required to have tax exempt status. It would actually be a constitutional violation to single them out for it, as it would be government sponsorship of religious activities. The law ignores whether a given organization is religious. What it does pay attention to is whether it’s a non-profit. Non-profits, because society has decided they are worth encouraging, are given tax-exempt status, and donations to them are tax-deductible.
Non-profits in general, not just churches, are required to live by certain regulations if they want tax-exempt status. One of these is a lack of overt campaign activities and endorsements. (They’re allowed to talk about specific political issues, advocate for a bill, and a variety of other related things.) The main reason for this is that making an organization tax-exempt costs the government money, and the country has decided it doesn’t want to subsidize these activities. Also, allowing this would create a loophole a mile wide in campaign finance reform laws. (And any attempt to add the regulations necessary to prevent that would subject churches to a huge amount of additional regulation.)
So what about free speech? Don’t they have a right to make political endorsements? The individuals do, and the clergy are free to engage in politics in their own time. The organizations also do, but they don’t have a right to tax-exempt status. When the government gives favors, it can attach strings. There are limits of course, but this one is reasonable.
The real point here is a larger one. When religious organizations get favors from the government, they get entangled with the government. The separation of church and state is as much about protecting the church from the state as it is the reverse. As soon as a religious organization becomes accustomed to government favors of some kind, it loses its independence. The government can attach conditions to these favors that it would never be able to impose on the churches directly. Even without the formal conditions, the religious groups have to be wary of doing politically unpopular things, since part of the backlash could be the removal of those favors. If you think it’s important that government not dictate limitations on religious practices, then you should also think it’s important the religious groups get no special favors. And those religious organizations that are so unhappy about the endorsement rules should think twice about demanding a faith-based initiative that allows the government to directly fund may of their activities.
Skeptical blogging brainstorm #3
In editions #1 and #2 of this series, I explained some ways I think atheist and/or skeptical bloggers can make and keep themselves relevant and useful. This is my last intended installment (at least, in such a formal sense), and I intend to use it to talk about getting the word out and educating the public. After all, the one good thing about having so many near-identical blog posts about Bigfoot, or about intelligent design, or whatever else, is that when someone searches the internet for “Bigfoot” or “intelligent design” their likelihood of finding a skeptical site instead of a credulous one is increased. Marginally, of course. Messing with Google rankings is a slow and dismal process. The goal, though, is an important one: making sure the public has an opportunity (and a meaningful probability) of hearing a skeptical perspective.
Perhaps the way to get better search traffic is something more along the lines of linking the word Expelled to the site Expelled Exposed when writing about Ben Stein’s movie. True, the traffic goes somewhere else, not our blogs (one reason I suspect it might be tempting for every blogger to write their own posts on these topics) — but if a good explanation has already been written with expertise, we should make a practice of linking to it when relevant, rather than wasting time and energy reinventing the wheel. I could imagine a pretty slick sidebar add-on or widget with a headline like, “There’s no evidence for:” and a (scrolling?) list of links beneath it, including whichever things you wanted to debunk.
With all that time we save linking to preexisting well-written skeptical essays, I’m sure we can come up with lots of other worthwhile discussion about how to more effectively express the value of a scientific mindset and a respect for evidence. Remember, lots of people aren’t on the internet as often as we are, and most people aren’t changing their mind because they read one snarky blog. They’re forming their opinions about science and evidence out there in the real world, so we should talk about and work towards taking our advocacy there.
I read several interesting posts a couple weeks ago by Steven Novella about how to improve science education, science textbooks, and support for science teachers. It’s clear just from the comments there that not everyone agrees with his opinions (although, in very large part, I do) but at any rate, it’s surely a conversation we ought to be having. Skeptics can make a great contribution to science education, in some cases by being great teachers or involved parents, but also just as regular, not-directly-related citizens, going to speak at a school board meeting or writing letters to local lawmakers. The education doesn’t just happen in school buildings, of course. Maybe we should be going door-to-door. (I know I linked a comic there, but in all seriousness, I love that idea.) Maybe we should be passing out flyers on the sidewalk in front of the Creation Museum or the Discovery Institute. These educational toys are a great example of thinking outside of the box about this issue. Both the strategies we should to get our message out and the content of our message are worth some discussion on our blogs.
As usual, I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this in the comments. More importantly though, I hope I’ve given you some food for thought if you have a blog of your own.