Donald Trump, the Anti-Skeptic

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that last week Donald J. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States.

In this post I'm going to leave aside his racism, his sexism, his violent and fascist rhetoric, his endless lies, and even his complete lack of relevant knowledge or qualifications. Instead, I want to highlight the fact that he is a raving conspiracy nut and a gullible fool.

Climate Change Denier
Trump believes climate change is a deliberate hoax, and uses cold local weather as evidence.

• "Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!" Source
• "NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?" Source
• "This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice" Source
• "Any and all weather events are used by the GLOBAL WARMING HOAXSTERS to justify higher taxes to save our planet! They don't believe it $$$$!" Source

Trump called global warming a conspiracy created by China and perpetrated by scientists.

• "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." Source
• Trump later claimed he was "being sarcastic" but also "a little bit serious." Source
• "It's a hoax. I think the scientists are having a lot of fun." Source

Anti-Vaxxer
Trump believes that "massive vaccinations" cause autism and there’s a conspiracy to cover it up.

• "I am being proven right about massive vaccinations—the doctors lied. Save our children & their future." Source
• "I'm not against vaccinations for your children, I'm against them in 1 massive dose. Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!" Source
• "No more massive injections. Tiny children are not horses—one vaccine at a time, over time." Source

Ebola Truther
Trump alleged a CDC conspiracy to minimize the danger of Ebola.

• "Ebola is much easier to transmit than the CDC and government representatives are admitting. Spreading all over Africa-and fast. Stop flights" Source
• (Just 6 of Africa’s 54 countries had even a single Ebola case during the outbreak.) Source

Birther Movement Leader
Trump was a leader in the Obama "birther" conspiracy theorist movement.

• Trump repeatedly suggested Obama was born in Kenya and pushed him to release his birth certificate: "Well I've been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing. I've been told that it's not there or it doesn't exist." Source
• He claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii to look into his past. "I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding." Nothing came of the alleged investigation. Source
• He falsely suggested that Obama didn’t go to the schools he claimed to: "Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I'll go a step further: The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don't know who he is. It's crazy." Source
• He falsely stated that Obama’s grandmother said he was born in Kenya: "His grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth, okay?" Source
• Once Obama released his birth certificate, Trump claimed it was a forgery: "An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud." Source
• Asked in 2015 if Obama was born in the U.S., he responded: "No. I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, I don't know why he wouldn't release his records." Source

Trump has repeatedly implied that Obama is secretly a Muslim.

• "He doesn't have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there's something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want that." Source
• On multiple occasions, he has not corrected supporters who claimed he is a Muslim. Source 1, Source 2
• When asked about a possible Muslim president, Trump said: "Some people have said it already happened, frankly. Of course, you wouldn’t agree with that." Source

Trump implied the Obama administration assassinated the woman who verified his birth certificate: 

• "How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s 'birth certificate' died in plane crash today. All others lived." Source

JFK Conspiracist
Trump bought into a National Enquirer story linking Ted Cruz's father to Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination.

• "[Cruz’s] father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being, you know, shot. I mean the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right, prior to his being shot? And nobody even brings it up. What was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible." Source

Anti-Skeptic
Conspiracies aside, Trump believes just about any ridiculous thing that supports his views.

• Trump retweeted an obvious hoax that spouted racist homicide statistics. Most egregiously, it claimed that 81% of homicides against whites are committed by blacks. (The true number is 15%.) Source
• Trump tweeted a hoax video tying a protester to ISIS. When it was pointed out to him as a hoax, he doubled down: “He was dragging a flag along the ground and he was playing a certain type of music. And supposedly, there was chatter about ISIS. Now, I don't know. What do I know about it? All I know is what's on the internet.” Source

I think all of this makes it clear that Trump is no friend of the skeptical movement. In fact, he's nearly as far from a skeptic as it's possible to be.

As president of the United States, Trump would have to make difficult, critical judgments based on complex information from a variety of sources. Sometimes the trustworthiness of those sources can be difficult to discern. Based on Trump's many credulous statements, he absolutely be entrusted with this crucial task.

For this and countless other reasons, Donald Trump has no business getting anywhere close to the office of the presidency.

Ever Tried, Ever Failed...

The man himself.

There's a quote that's been bouncing around in my head for the past few weeks. It comes from Samuel Beckett's novella Worstward Ho, and it goes like this:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Seems a bit gloomy at first, doesn't it? What a pessimistic outlook, to believe you're in a constant state of failure. The common saying goes, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again"—the implication being that eventually, you will.

Beckett's quote makes no such promise. If you try again, you'll fail again. But it's the last bit that's really stuck with me.

Fail better.

That two-word sentence, to me, crystallizes the essence of what makes us human. We're such tremendous failures, the human race. We still have no idea what we're doing, broadly speaking. We're puny, fragile, ignorant things. And yet we keep trundling along. We make mistakes... and eventually, we fail better.

It's not just the human race. It's the essence of science, of how we unlock the world around us. Our understanding of the universe has been built up incrementally, painstakingly over millennia.

There was a time when we thought the seat of our consciousness was in the heart and not the brain. What a spectacular failure. Today we know the specific functions of most parts of the brain, yet we still don't have a clue how they come together to create a "self." We've failed again—but better. Success is not in the nature of science. We don't set out to prove things, but rather to create flawed yet increasingly accurate models of the world.

And it's not just humanity or science. It's the essence of me. I fail constantly. I failed today. I'll fail tomorrow. And when I do, I will pick myself up, dust myself off and say:

No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

A Friendly Conversation

Recently my dad caught up with an old friend of his. I didn't ask to use his name, so I'll just call him Steve. He became a Christian a few years ago after having been raised Muslim and remaining so for most of his life.

Steve wrote a short book about his experiences, and since copy-editing is on my list of potential career options, my dad volunteered me to read through it. It basically consisted of his life story, with a focus on his conversion to Christianity, as well as various arguments for his adopted religion and against other viewpoints.

The universally accepted meeting
place, for some reason.

After I sent the manuscript back to him, he asked about my own views, and upon learning I was an atheist, he suggested we meet for coffee so he could better understand my perspective.

So last Wednesday we spent thirty or forty minutes discussing atheism and related topics. I was a bit apprehensive going in, but thankfully it was a casual, friendly conversation, with an atmosphere of learning rather than debate.

He asked whether I had been a Christian by "default" or whether it was something I actively believed, so I gave him a bit of my background and conversion to Christianity. And how I became curious in my college years of what the opposing evidence looked like, how my investigation of creationism was the starting point for my eventual departure from the faith. 

From there, Steve asked me for my definition of atheism—always a good start for a discussion on the topic. I was pleased to discover that he easily understood the distinction between strong and weak atheism. I explained the need for evidence in proportion to the extraordinary nature of the claims made, and how the idea of God represents such a departure from everything we know about the world that it has an incredibly high evidential bar to meet.

Steve made a few of the standard points for Christianity, which I let go mostly unchallenged, to make sure we stayed in the realm of discussion rather than conflict. He asked what I think happens when we die, and pointed out that if that's true, it kinda sucks. No argument from me there, though it's not a total loss. He brought up Pascal's Wager, although more out of curiosity as to how I approach belief than as an argument in favor of belief.

The problem of evil was mentioned as an example argument, to which free will was of course the vanilla reply. I brought up animal suffering, which it seemed he hadn't considered in that context before. Steve's response was that if animals were treated differently, people might notice and see it as evidence of divine intervention, thus violating free will. While I don't find that very convincing—even if biblical God cared about free will, he could probably find a way to circumvent at least some of the suffering we see—for an improvised explanation, it wasn't terrible.

Steve thanked me for my time and for what he was able to learn from our conversation. He would pray for me, and that my bar of evidence would be met. Despite my warning that I may not read it due to time constraints, he said he would send me Josh McDowell's book Evidence That Demands a Verdict. And he expressed a hope that I would continue to research Christianity. It brought to mind a post I made a while back about my pro-Christian bias: that I've already given Christianity so much more attention than I would give any other faith.

Even though I don't think any minds will be changed as a result of our conversation, I'm glad to have had the chance to talk with Steve. It's heartening to know there are religious people who are genuinely curious about atheism, and willing to engage in a good-natured dialogue to learn about a different way of thinking.

Rational Giving

A few days ago I donated what was, for me, a hefty sum of money to three different charities. 70% of my donation went to the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides insecticide-treated mosquito nets to prevent malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. 20% went to GiveDirectly, which distributes cash straight to needy individuals in Kenya. 10% went to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which treats children in sub-Saharan Africa for parasite infections.

And the entire sum was donated via GiveWell, an organization that researches charities to determine which are the most efficient at saving and improving lives.

Here's why I chose this particular donation strategy—and why you should, too.

As it turns out, a lot of charities suck. Maybe even most. They're either inefficient, ineffective, lack transparency or have unintended consequences like damaging the local economy. (See examples here and here.) Some are actually worse than doing nothing at all. For instance, the "Scared Straight" program, which takes kids on tours of prisons to discourage criminal behavior, was found to increase delinquency compared to doing nothing. Even the practices of big-name charities like Kiva, Smile Train and UNICEF have raised concerns.

Furthermore, many charities (intentionally or not) post misleading information about their own effectiveness. For instance, since malaria nets from Nothing But Nets cost $10 each to make and deliver, they claim an astounding rate of one child's life saved for every $10 given. But roughly 95% of kids would have survived even without nets, and it's not known what proportion of delivered nets are actually used. It's all too common for charities to exaggerate their impact and ignore hidden costs like this. And since most have never been independently evaluated, so we have no real way of knowing how effective they are.

But for most people, none of that's really on the radar. They pick a charity based purely on how it resonates with them emotionally. They may see an ad featuring a starving child with sad puppy-dog eyes, skim a few anecdotal endorsements and start reaching for their pocketbook. All without doing any research. Sure, their hearts are in the right place, but isn't it more important to ensure that we're actually helping people? It's okay to let our emotions drive our generosity, but we need to let reason steer us toward options that will do the most good.

That's where GiveWell comes in. This group looks for charities that:

• Offer strong evidence of positive impact
• Are extremely cost-effective
• Will use added funding productively, without diminishing returns
• Are highly transparent and accountable

So why trust GiveWell? Well, they've been endorsed both by major media outlets and by experts in the field. They're fully transparent: their research is publicly available, they record their board meetings for donor scrutiny, and much more. They've subjected themselves to intense external evaluation. And their three top-recommended charities have been thoroughly vetted, and are monitored via written reports as well as photo and video evidence.

GiveWell's top-rated charities have the most positive impact of any they've evaluated thus far. Through AMF, it costs about $1.36 per year to protect someone with a malaria net. Through SCI, it costs about $0.51 to treat someone for parasites. And through GiveDirectly, it costs about $4.50 per year to keep a metal roof over someone's head. There are still some unknowns, as there would be for any charity. But right now, these three have the most powerful balance of efficiency and credibility.

Lastly, why did I choose to give via GiveWell rather than to the charities directly? Because it helps GiveWell. Not because they take any of the money—they don't—but for other important reasons. First, giving through GiveWell means they'll have more sway among charities. If their recommendations are shown to substantially impact people's giving habits, charities are more likely to cooperate with their investigations. And second, it gives more publicity both to GiveWell and to the effective altruism movement as a whole, thereby influencing even more people to give effectively. You help the charities, and you help the meta-charity. It's essentially like making your donation count twice.

You don't have to take my word for all this. I encourage you to do your own research. On the other hand, it's easy to get so overwhelmed with ideas and options that you succumb to analysis paralysis and end up doing nothing. So if I've convinced you that this approach to giving is worthwhile, please consider making a donation here. Thank you.

My Evolution on Gay Marriage

Now that the Supreme Court has heard arguments on two gay marriage cases, that the number of senators publicly supporting it has jumped to more than half, and that public opinion has now shifted decisively in its favor, I thought it might be a good time to chronicle how my own views of gay marriage have changed.

For most of my life as a Christian, homosexuality wasn't even really on my radar. The concept was largely foreign to me. When it did finally trickle into my consciousness, I felt no animosity toward gay people; I just considered it a strange and sinful way of thinking and behaving.

I never held very strong opinions on gay marriage, but the issue came to a head in 2008 with the introduction of Prop 8 in my home state of California. I remember that it was something I went back and forth on, but sadly I ultimately voted in favor. My rationale at the time was that gay people could still have civil unions and get the same benefits without taking on the title of marriage.

At the time, I thought that was enough. My vote on this issue was probably the last truly harmful action I took as a result of my religious beliefs. Though I no longer think that civil rights issues should be put to a majority vote, a small part of me wishes this one would be, just so I and others like me could redeem ourselves.

I didn't think much about the issue again until what was probably late 2010—after I had started questioning my faith, but before I became an atheist. I came across this video by prominent atheist and LGBT blogger Zinnia Jones.

In the first half of the video she rattles off a number of potential disadvantages associated with civil unions, but the second half (starting at 1:30) was what really struck me. If civil unions are identical to marriage in every way but in name, why is there a need to make a distinction at all? What does marriage offer straight couples that they need and gay couples can't have?

My views on gay marriage were already tenuously held, but that video was what solidified them decisively in its favor. At this point, I think it's clear that there are no decent arguments against gay marriage, and that most secular arguments have been propped up in order to disguise religiously-motivated concerns. I'm glad to see public opinion changing so rapidly, and look forward to seeing how each sect and denomination will respond to gay marriage's inevitable acceptance.

Life in the Open

In church for Christmas. Nice decor, but
it could maybe use a few more trees.

It's been a little over a year since I came out to my family as an atheist, and surprisingly little has changed. Certainly, they were upset at first. My mom asked me tearfully over lunch why I hadn't told them sooner. A little while later she asked me, not threateningly but solemnly, if I realized what happens if I'm wrong about Christianity. And my dad and I had a few brief, cordial lunchtime debates on religious topics.

Sometimes my parents asked me if I wanted to go with them to church, which I politely turned down except for a few times when it seemed especially important to them—Christmas and Easter, for instance. And a couple of weeks before Christmas they got me a book of arguments for God, which I may work through here if it turns out to be worthwhile. (If so, I'm also thinking about formulating a version of my 30 questions for them to read in return.)

But what I listed above is basically the full extent of their reaction over the past fourteen months. Given that I spend time with them virtually every day, it's surprisingly subdued. For the most part, the topic of my atheism was barely touched after just a couple of weeks.

I have mixed feelings about my family's relative lack of interest in my unbelief. On the one hand, it's great. It's wonderful to be able to talk and have fun with them without feeling distant or uncomfortable. And to be clear, I certainly wouldn't trade this outcome for one where I'm constantly arguing. Still, part of me can't help but be amazed at what a small impact my coming out has had. Having grown up as a Christian, it's all too easy for me to think about my situation from the believer's perspective. If I were an ardent Christian and my sister told me she was an atheist, what would I do? Hmm...

My reaction is confusion, then horror. One of the people I love most in the entire world will be spending eternity weeping and gnashing her teeth in outer darkness! I have to do something, anything to convince her that she's strayed from the straight and narrow! I try to tread carefully around this sensitive topic, but I'm far too curious not to ask what changed her mind. Based on her response, I spend hours researching, steeped in books and articles from renowned apologists, training myself to make the perfect case for the Christian faith. Then, when the timing is right, I broach the subject as tactfully as I can and present my talking points.

Given the seriousness of eternal punishment, the only response that makes sense to me is to expend every available resource in pursuit of saving the lives of my loved ones. Granted, it's important not to come on too strong and drive them further away, but neither will it work to skirt the issue almost entirely.

...So why is avoidance the response I'm seeing here?

It's certainly not that my family is too selfish and unmotivated to come to my aid. They've demonstrated their affection in so many other ways that this holds no water at all. And it isn't that they don't believe what they claim to, just because their behavior doesn't perfectly match their beliefs. I hate it when people draw this conclusion about religious people. It could be that they're nervous about driving me away, just as I would be, but that's probably not the whole story.

I think the best explanation is that humans don't always think through the full consequences of their beliefs. Religious or not, we rarely make optimal decisions given the information available to us. In a way it's not strange to believe in a world of epic spiritual warfare, yet still fret more about what we're having for lunch tomorrow than about saving people from horrific eternal fates. After all, how much time and effort do we devote to worrying about trivial problems like morning rush hour, compared to serious ones like the millions of people suffering from starvation and disease? It's the same basic principle, minus the eschatology.

This may be the most important set of insights that leaving Christianity has taught me—is still teaching me.

Humans are irrational. We make bad, short-sighted decisions. And if we want to bring about as much good as we can, it's imperative that we improve our decision-making, both for our own sake and for others.

So I'm glad that I can live a life in the open, where I'm free to believe what I like without looking over my shoulder. But the next step is much more difficult. Can I live a life where I'm open with myself? Where I constantly challenge the mental weaknesses that keep me from achieving what really matters?

Can you?

Bias Profile: The Just-World Fallacy

Do you believe in karma?

That what goes around comes around? That you reap what you sow?

If you believe any of these holds true as a rule, you may be a victim of the just-world fallacy (sometimes referred to more charitably as a "hypothesis").

Even other species of primates hold a sense of fairness as part of their core identity. In a 2010 study, chimpanzees were trained to exchange tokens for a food reward—either a piece of carrot (low reward) or a grape (high reward). When one chimp was given a grape and the other a carrot, the latter was more likely than in the "fair" control group to refuse the reward after seeing what the other received. Interesting, but maybe not too surprising. But here's what's really fascinating: In this highly competitive species, even the chimp that received the grape was significantly more likely to refuse their reward.

If such a powerful sense of justice exists in chimps, it's no wonder that this concept is integral to human society. The problem comes in when our sense of justice collides with our tendency to ascribe agency where it doesn't belong. What happens when tragedy strikes but there's no one to blame? Or when the bad guy gets away, figuratively or literally, with murder? That's when the just-world fallacy kicks in.

If a natural disaster strikes a major city, fundamentalists are prone to interpreting it as divine punishment after the fact. Hurricane Katrina is a prime example. No less than five different motivations were offered for God's wrath: sexual immorality, abortion, racism, failure to support Israel, and (from al-Qaeda) America's attacks on al-Qaeda.

When human justice fails to punish evil deeds, religion offers a comfortable alternative: divine retribution in this life or the next. Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism each have their own concept of karma and reincarnation, which, while not always directly caused by God, generally involve the accumulation of positive or negative consequences depending on one's actions. And contrary to what some Christians believe, the Bible repeatedly states that believers will be judged according to their works.

Perhaps most disturbingly, the just-world fallacy can cause people to blame the victim of a crime rather than the perpetrator, believing that they must have deserved it in some way since no visible justice was served. If a woman is raped, maybe she was "asking for it" by her choice of dress. In cases of spousal abuse, maybe she had done something wrong to warrant that treatment. It's a terrifying rationale, and one that we should be doing our best to eradicate.

Religion is far from the sole factor here, but it certainly plays a role. When one believes that a god or other mystical force maintains perfect moral order in the universe, one has to explain injustices somehow. But by rationalizing horrible crimes and misfortunes, just-worlders throw a wrench into the already chaotic workings of human justice. Only when we realize that humanity alone is burdened with the task of punishing criminals and aiding victims can we hope to achieve a truly fair and equitable society.

2012 in Review

Okay, so 2012 wasn't exactly a banner year for Other Side Reflections in terms of activity—at least compared to the previous year, which is when I began blogging. 2011 had 170 posts while 2012 had only 39, and just eight of those came from the latter six months.

There are a number of reasons for that, including writing fatigue, lack of necessity, and moving on to other interests. Still, I do plan to update here now and then, and hopefully to at least match the level of activity I managed last year.

In the meantime, here's an index of the posts I made in the last nine months of 2012, much as I've done in the past. Here are my posts from April:

• January–March in Review: An index of the 20 posts from the year's first quarter
• Powerful Thoughts, Vol. 5: More skeptical quotes from great thinkers
• Born at the Wrong Time: Why is this the only time that God's not talking to us?
• The Uncertainty of Intuition: This useful mental tool can also lead you astray
• My 5 Favorite Freethought Quotes: Culled from my Powerful Thoughts series
• On Ultimate Significance: Does life still mean something if it will ultimately end?
• The Purpose of Hell: It fails to fulfill any of the various theories of justice

From May through July:

• Fun With Memes: They're silly, but can make their point in a concise, funny way
• The Televangelist's Con: Analyzing a scammer I found while channel surfing
• The Key to Science: How a few simple steps can put the world at our fingertips
• No Religious Test: 8 state constitutions discriminate against atheists holding office
• Shifting Focus: Why I've been less active on the blog
• Political Sites for Skeptics (1/2): Fact-checkers, statisticians and other resources
• But It's Not Hurting Anyone!: 5 ways that snake oil harms our society

And from the remainder of the year:

• Political Sites for Skeptics (2/2): Informative voting databases, Snopes and more
• While We're Young: How Christianity is packaged into a slick production for kids
• Electoral Prediction and Cognitive Bias: Beware the rationalizations of politics
• San Diego New Atheists & Agnostics Meetups: Summary of two great events
• Problems of Implementing Rationality: Not Respecting Superstitions: A guest post from Michael Caton of The Lucky Atheist

It's not much, but what I did put out, I'm happy with.

Problems of Implementing Rationality: Not Respecting Superstitions

In my last post I mentioned that we might see a guest appearance from Mike of The Lucky Atheist, so without further ado, here it is. He expands on the ideas presented here in this post on his own blog.

Thanks to Tim for letting me guest post. Here I'm posting about a particular problem of actually implementing rationality in your life. If this particular thought has crossed your mind before, I discuss a few others at my own blog, The Lucky Atheist.

Atheism is one outcome of applying more rational thinking to everything in our lives. But humans are not pure rational creatures, and even though some of us see the practical, real benefits of applying good rationality habits to our own thinking, and trying to help others see those same benefits, there are coordination problems. We're not lone hunter-gatherers in the savannah, problem-solving our way to evading big cats or treating infections. Quite the contrary, the vast majority of your happiness and material well-being depends on other human beings, many of whom are irrational as all get-out! So the problem is how does an erstwhile rationalist optimize outcomes for her or himself, without being out of sync with the irrational human beings around them? (I call optimizing for the near-term for purposes of coordinating with irrational people "sub-rationality".)

Maybe the best example is how to handle particular superstitions. What if people that you depend on for a paycheck (or something) believe, or claim to believe, in God, or fan death, or the evils of vaccinations? What do you do?

1. Tell/show them why they're wrong.
2. Keep your mouth shut.
3. Say or do something to show loyalty to the idea even though you know it's BS.

To optimize your own outcome in the near term, it seems #2 or #3 should be the way to go; pay lip service to it or at least don't object, while not actually making decisions based on the belief. #1's risk ostracism, and even if convincing people of their folly is the goal, they may not even accomplish this. Granted, this may be a slippery slope, but it doesn't make the problems of implementing rationality disappear, and I'm posting these to look for solutions.

One problem is that if you do #1, and the superstition involves bad fortune, and something does happen to you, you know that superstitious people will all point to the superstition. "He walked under a ladder and got really sick that week. Well of course!" More generally though, it occurs in situations like these: you're hiking, and you knew damn well doesn't matter which trail you take, or you're working on some project and you know it doesn't matter which tool you use, which way you cook something, etc. But someone who thought s/he knew better (boss, friend, teacher, etc.) insisted that one of the two ways was superior. And you thought to yourself, "I have equal chances of success at this task with either method. And if I choose the method that the other person claims is inferior, and I fail, I will never ever hear the end of it. Since it doesn't matter, I'll just choose the method they prefer and be done with it." Rational in the near-term, but you just reinforced someone else's irrational belief about the task at hand.

Another point here is that of the three courses of action in the face of others' collective irrational beliefs, it seems that many or most of the #2's and 3's, i.e. people who don't object or even appear to go along with Superstition X, actually don't endorse it with their behavior, and in fact this often appears to be exactly the case. Do supposedly creationist Christians expect their insurance companies to give them a discount because more people are praying for them? Do they refuse to go to doctors trained in evolution? Do they refuse to invest their retirement money with mutual funds that buy shares of oil companies that operate based on secular old-Earth assumptions? (No doubt many of them do think they believe what they say they believe, but I'm sure there are plenty professing creationists who know it's nonsense and just like the benefits afforded by their church membership.)

The problem is that while you're optimizing for yourself in the near-term – and you really are – you're reinforcing the nonsense. Someone else who sees you mouthing the superstition in question thinks to him or herself, "Well, I better go along with it, because she just did too – and who am I to say it's not actually true?" Case in point: just last week I mentioned the difficulty with treating a patient who was ardently pro-homeopathy. The nurse sternly told me that so was she. (This, at UCSD!!!) Do you think I took this opportunity to lecture her on her irrationality? No. I'm a medical student, so I'm the lowest in the hierarchy anywhere I go. Not only would my #1 have not been received, I would have decreased my own utility in the process. So I did #2. Justification for my sub-rationality? So I can do a #1 when I'm an attending physician.

San Diego New Atheists & Agnostics Meetups

Over the past few weeks I've been to a couple of events hosted by the Meetup.com group San Diego New Atheists and Agnostics. One was earlier this evening: an informal five-on-five soccer match for which I was tragically unprepared. My lack of endurance running ability aside, though, I had a great time.

Nonbelievers of all stripes showed up, but what struck me about the meetup was how little about nonbelief it was. We had a short chat, warmed up a bit, and got right down to playing. In other contexts it might have been nice to talk at length about our common views on religion and theism. But in a way it was refreshing to see us come together, get some exercise and have some fun without having to frame it in terms of belief or lack thereof.

You can read a summary of the other event, a presentation by Secular Coalition for America's executive director Edwina Rogers, in my guest post over at The Lucky Atheist. I've written a bit about this blog before, but to summarize, Mike Caton runs the only other active San Diego-based atheist/skeptic blog that I'm aware of, and he puts out good stuff. Hopefully we'll see a guest post from Mike over here at some point in the near future.

Electoral Prediction and Cognitive Bias

Over the past couple of weeks, a startling number of pundits and commentators have been relentlessly attacking political statistician Nate Silver and his blog FiveThirtyEight. Why? Because his electoral prediction model, which uses a mix of national polls, state polls, demographic information and economic data, calculates that Obama's chances of winning the election are slightly better than the convention wisdom suggests. At present, they're hovering at a little below 75 percent.

Nate has a great track record when it comes to predictions: In 2008, he called all 35 Senate races right, as well as 49 of 50 states for president. In 2010, he correctly called 34 of 37 Senate races and 36 of 37 governors' races. When he was wrong, the outcome was usually decided by a razor-thin margin. And his reasoning for this year's prediction is simple: Obama holds small leads in enough crucial swing states (e.g. Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa) to get him to the needed 270 electoral votes.

But the critics dismiss all that, declaring in a textbook case of 20–20 hindsight that those other predictions were a cakewalk, and this time is different. They whine that Nate's biased because he's rooting for Obama (which never shows in his incredibly calm and even-handed commentary). They complain that his poll weighting system is subjective and introduces bias (even though it's actually based on objective measurements of poll recency, methodology and track record). And when all else fails, they mock him as puny and effeminate.

It would be one thing if Nate was alone in making the forecast that he does... but he's not. The various prediction markets, which despite their flaws are usually pretty accurate, tend to mirror his probability estimate very closely. And it turns out that his model is actually quite generous to Romney compared to other competing models of the same type.

So why have Nate's projections been subjected to such merciless criticism? For several reasons, none of which have anything to do with the merits of his model.

One is that the media has an incentive to portray elections as close—in this case, a virtual dead heat—so that people get excited and tune in for more coverage. So when someone comes along claiming that one candidate actually has a small but substantial lead, the public and the less-savvy pundits are naturally skeptical.

Another reason comes down to the fact that people do a very poor job of grasping probabilities. Commentators hear Nate estimate a 75% chance of Obama winning and think, "Wow, he must be really sure of himself." That's certainly the impression Joe Scarborough gave when he insisted that Obama's chances were at 50.1%. But Nate's prediction isn't all that dramatic. What many fail to understand is that if you assign Event X a 75% probability of occurring, it means you expect it to not happen 25% of the time. In fact, if such events occur more often than three out of four times in the long run, you've made a very real error.

The third and most glaring reason is a combination of wishful thinking and confirmation bias. Conservatives want very badly for Romney to win this election (or more to the point, for Obama to lose), so some will do anything to interpret the data as favorably as possible. Their most common defense is an allegation that the pollsters are (intentionally or not) oversampling Democrats—a claim based on the faulty assumption that party identification is static, rather than fluid and subject to change in response to current events. Another is to hold polls favoring Obama to a higher methodological standard, while clinging uncritically to those favoring Romney, such as the overly volatile Gallup tracking poll. Still another is to ignore polls altogether and point to less direct indicators, like an alleged closing of the gap between male and female voters or the candidates' favorability ratings. Yet one more is to claim, baselessly, that undecided voters break dramatically against the incumbent. Anything to keep the dream alive.

Meet the man who thought Bush's response to Katrina
would be his crowning achievement.

Finally, the more cynical conservative pundits may be consciously biasing their predictions. They have an incentive to tell their audience what they want to hear—Republicans who want to be reassured will look to them for certainty. Dick Morris, for instance, has such a catastrophic track record of predicting GOP victories that it's hard to imagine he's anything but an opportunist looking to get more attention and sell more books.

Now, before any staunch liberals out there get too cocky about the follies of their counterparts across the aisle, I should point out that this mindset is by no means limited to one party or ideology. In 2004, Democrats were guilty of groundlessly criticizing poll oversampling just as Republicans are today. And a quick perusal of the comments on Nate's blog posts will reveal many left-leaning readers expressing far more confidence in Obama's chances than is warranted by the data. Many of his acolytes also seem to follow the blog just to pacify their anxieties rather than to follow the data wherever it leads. So no matter what your politics, beware of how your biases influence your views and expectations.

Now I leave you with one final prediction. If Romney wins, you can bet that all the critics will be crowing with triumph and declaring the demise of FiveThirtyEight. But if Nate turns out to be right, you can bet those same critics will brush it off as a fluke, blaming voter fraud or Hurricane Sandy or anything else they can think of to resolve their cognitive dissonance, in much the same way that a cult will rationalize its failed doomsday predictions.

While We're Young

I was going through all the ancient stuff I had buried at the bottom of my desk drawers and came across this:

It's a letter from my former church congratulating me on becoming a Christian, from way back in July of '96. I was seven at the time.

Seems so innocuous, doesn't it? They were so glad to welcome me into the fold. They assured me I had made the right choice, a vital choice, renewing the sense of relief I had from avoiding damnation. They invited me to the Clubhouse—the name has that enticing air of exclusiveness about it. Actually, they didn't invite me: the subtle use of "when" made it a foregone conclusion that I would attend. Tell your parents what time you want to come, they suggested. Have fun, watch puppet shows, sing songs. And oh, by the way, bring your friends!

It really was fun. They put on an engaging production in the church auditorium, surprisingly polished for a kid's program. There were engrossing quiz games, props and puppets flying everywhere, funny voiceovers over the loudspeaker—more like watching an interactive play than attending a sermon. The stuff for older kids was considerably more dry and dull, but they really knew how to reel in the six-to-ten crowd. They understood the importance of grabbing our attention from a young age.

I'm probably making all this sound too sinister. I can only assume that these were genuinely nice people with pure intentions. The goal was not to snare hapless children in some nefarious trap. But when good people are misguided, when they're incredibly motivated, when they have years and decades and centuries to hone their sales pitch, when their target audience still believes in the tooth fairy... well, it's not exactly a fair fight.

Political Sites for Skeptics, Part 2

I forgot a few key resources in my previous post about neutral and/or skeptical political sites. So, without further ado...

Two of these sites are On The Issues and ProCon.org. These resources list the political stances of politicians and commentators in a simple and straightforward way. To do so, they use their legislative voting record as well as direct quotations from speeches and books. Here are On The Issues' pages for Obama, Biden, Romney, his newly-selected VP candidate Paul Ryan, and the main third-party candidate, libertarian Gary Johnson. ProCon compares six presidential candidates' answers to 61 questions in this handy chart. (They also have some good, even-handed information on other controversial issues at their main page.)

Then there are the "transparency" sources. Most people lump politicians in with the likes of lawyers and used car salesmen in terms of honesty and integrity, but it's often hard to know exactly where their loyalties lie. OpenSecrets goes a long way toward solving that problem by posting detailed information about what special interest groups are donating to whom—for example, SOPA author Lamar Smith's media-based donors. Their side-by-side comparison of the two presidential candidates is also quite nice. GovTrack is useful for keeping track of the voting records of various legislators—Paul Ryan's, for instance. MapLight is another potentially useful site that combines the latter two.

Finally—and I have no idea how I could forget this one—there's Snopes. Sure, they tackle every subject under the sun, but they have a specific page dedicated to politics, and even separate subsections for Obama and Romney. There are a ton of rumors about Obama that have bubbled up over the past five or so years, and the vast majority of the ones tackled here are exposed for the sensationalist nonsense they are. Barbara and David Mikkelson do a great job researching and running the site, and their work in these areas mainly serve to highlight how immensely unreliable political chain emails tend to be.

Politics today is so vicious and partisan that finding reliable, neutral information is nearly impossible. It's hard for me to form opinions when so many sources present their information through the lens of their personal worldviews. With the help of the sites I've covered here, though, I feel like I have a fighting chance of distinguishing vested narrative from objective truth.

But It's Not Hurting Anyone!

What we have here in the title is perhaps the most common objection skeptics receive when we criticize an scientifically unproven "alternative" treatment. Those who utter this treacherous phrase usually do so with the best of intentions. The only problem is, they're almost always wrong.

The harm caused by snake oil treatments isn't necessarily obvious in every case. Disasters happen now and again, but usually the effects are very subtle. Here are some reasons, in general, why buying treatments of unproven efficacy would be a bad thing.

1. Ineffective treatments fail to prevent suffering. While patients may still benefit from the placebo effect, that effect is also present for treatments that really work. Snake oil wastes precious time that could have been spent actually treating the patient's ailments.
2. The chance of harmful side effects on the user. Acupuncture, for example, can expose people to serious infections, while detoxing can cause severe malnutrition. Naturally, scientific treatments can have side effects as well, but those that are approved for public use are well documented, and their benefits have been conclusively shown to outweigh their risks.
3. The chance of harmful side effects on the environment. For example, many remedies in Traditional Chinese Medicine are made from the body parts of rare animals like rhinoceros horns, tiger penises and bear bile. This can cause these animals to suffer unnecessarily, or to be hunted to endangerment and even extinction. This has far-reaching consequences not just for an individual species, but potentially for an entire ecosystem. 
4. Money is being wasted on companies who contribute nothing to society. Not only does this discourage the researchers and manufacturers from pursuing other more productive careers, but they will also use that money to market new brands of snake oil, perpetuating a cycle of medical ignorance.
5. Conversely, that money isn't going to more rigorous companies. This is money that could have been used for new and even more effective treatments, advancing medical science to new heights. And when science-based researchers and manufacturers are deprived of much-needed funding, they're that slight amount more likely to go out of business altogether.

Again, the damage caused by the purchase of a single alternative supplement is usually very small. But just as the seemingly insignificant votes of individuals can decide the fate of entire nations, those purchases add up to create entire industries of harmful "alternative" treatments. Even something as seemingly innocuous as a Power Balance bracelet contributes to a culture of scientific illiteracy that we should be trying our utmost to break away from.

Political Sites for Skeptics

I'm not going to delve too far into political issues with this blog. But since skepticism is a big part of what I write about here, I thought I'd take a few minutes to present some of the online resources I would recommend for skeptics to use when following politics.

If verifying political claims is your goal, both PolitiFact and FactCheck are invaluable resources. I especially like PolitiFact for its quick Truth-O-Meter ratings. Both parties tend to champion the sites when it supports them or attack them as biased when it doesn't—in other words, politics as usual. I won't claim that these sources are "true neutral," as that's difficult if not impossible to come by, but if they have a secret plot to further one side over the other, they've done a great job hiding it. Unfortunately, the sites are far from comprehensive. Apparently thorough, balanced reporting actually takes some time and effort—who knew?

As far as political discussion forums go... well, there's a subreddit for everything these days. I generally steer clear of the hard-left sensationalism of r/politics, in favor of smaller and more thought-provoking places like r/2012elections, r/PoliticalDiscussion, r/ModeratePolitics and r/NeutralPolitics. The first is highly topical, while the second is an open space for talking about every political idea under the sun. Even if you're not a moderate, chances are you'll still enjoy the latter two, as the focus is on civil discussion instead of creating an echo chamber. I like to view these four in unison as a single multireddit.

Want predictions and polling numbers? RealClearPolitics does a decent job of compiling the national figures, but FiveThirtyEight is the best source for polling data and data-driven political analysis I've found. It's run by Nate Silver, a professional statistician with an amazing track record of correct election predictions—49 of 50 states in the 2008 elections, for example. His model for predicting the 2012 outcome pulls in (among other things) virtually every state poll in the country and even corrects for systemic biases (e.g. registered versus likely voters). And his daily blog posts probe the nuances of political science in a completely detached, non-partisan tone. If you want to know who's going to without all the wishful thinking and daily gossip, this is your place.

Finally, I'll end with a decidedly partisan source: RightWingWatch. While there are unquestionably plenty of fringe wingnuts on the left (and let me know if you know of any reputable sites that compile madness on that side of the aisle), I'm including this one mainly due to its exemplary coverage of the extreme religious right. There are people in relatively influential positions who say things which are absolutely bonkers, but would fly under everyone's radar if RWW didn't cover it. They'll have a sensationalized headline now and then, but on the whole their reporting is an accurate portrayal of just how radical the fundamentalist faction of politics can be.

Being a skeptic with regard to the supernatural is relatively straightforward—it's just a matter of waiting until some phenomenon with sufficient evidence comes along. With politics it's a lot harder. To take a proactive stance on positions that have real impacts on millions of people is no small task—especially when the few objective facts available, are massaged and twisted beyond recognition. It's such a vicious and insular culture that keeping up can be exhausting, but with the help of these resources, I can at least be confident that I'm not completely in the dark.

Shifting Focus

I haven't written anything here in a while now—seven weeks, to be precise. There are a few reasons for that. One is a reduction in free time now that I have a full-time job on my plate. Another, frankly, is laziness. I still have a decent amount of free time, but I spend far too much of it on television and internet browsing. But perhaps most importantly, the original purpose of this blog has been accomplished: I've laid out in some detail why I'm no longer a Christian, and I'm (partially) out as an atheist.

So, what now?

Well, ever since I created this blog at the beginning of 2011, the subheading has been "My Reasons for Leaving Christianity." At the time I came up with it, I didn't yet consider myself an atheist yet—that happened a few months later.

But at this point I have more than enough reasons for leaving the religion I was born into. Despite my lingering bias towards Christianity, I feel I should be shifting focus a bit now that I really have migrated fully to the other side. And just what is the other side, anyway? Well, that's now answered explicitly in my new blog tagline:

Leaving Christianity and Embracing Skepticism

Although I call myself an atheist, it doesn't mean very much in itself to "embrace" atheism. It's only a stance on a single question, so I wanted a more positive and encompassing term to describe myself. I would also consider myself a freethinker and possibly a humanist, but "skeptic" really captures the basis of what I think atheism should be rooted in: applying proper standards of evidence equally to all claims, not just theistic ones.

I'll still have plenty of criticism for Christianity here—after all, it makes sense to stick with what I know. But the harm religion causes is just a small part of the harm caused by credulity in general. Fundamentally, it's the notion that belief can be justified without sufficient evidence that opens the door to belief in everything from vaccine denialism to faith healing to repressed memory therapy. So sometimes I'll be delving into a skeptical topic that's unrelated to any religious theme. But it'll all be for the same basic purpose: to help, in my own small way, to build a more informed and rational world.

In the past I've also tried to funnel my efforts into very detailed and involved posts. But that high bar has been a big part of my drop in motivation, and I'd rather have shorter, simpler posts than none at all. That doesn't necessarily mean a drop in quality; it just means that the deep analyses will be interspersed with pithier observations.

With these two changes, I hope to start posting a bit more often. Welcome to the next chapter of Reflections from the Other Side!