Quick Hitts

We all like to believe our group is better than their group, and atheists and skeptics are not immune, so this article, which claims that religious people are less compassionate than the non-religious,  didn’t surprise me.  Read it and see how many times your Bullshit Meter goes off.

Done? If you’d like to continue testing your meter here’s a more thorough and slightly less loaded report on the same study.

Your BSM should have gone off several times. Here are the points that set off mine. (If I missed any please smartnize me in the comments.)

First off, we can’t look at the actual study, because it hasn’t been published yet. “Science by press release” always pins my BSM needle.

The first experiment is based on a survey of people reporting on themselves. This is one of the least accurate ways to collect data, so it also pins the needle. The study was fairly small, including only 1,300 American adults. There was no mention of the demographics of these people. Were they all Berkley students? Old people? Young people? Where they from the upper, middle or lower economic class? One-legged lesbian Morris dancers? (Probably not that.) We’re never told.

There is also no indication any confounders were considered.

So the experiment’s conclusions don’t matter, because the data is useless.

The second was a sample size of 101, very small, and again, there were no demographics or confounders mentioned.  Bzzzt!  (I’ve rigged my BSM with a buzzer, just in case I don’t notice the needle moving.)

In the final experiment at least they tell us that we’re dealing with college students. But a significant amount of the conclusion was based on how compassionate they felt when they started the experiment. What? How do you measure such a thing, and how valid is it when you base your conclusions on self-reported emotion?

There are a plethora of people whose profession is knocking our bullshit meters out of whack. Some of them do it by providing conclusions we’d like to believe. We need to be just as skeptical of studies with results we like as we are of studies that immediately raise our hackles.  Personally, I’d like to believe we are more compassionate than our superstitious neighbors.  We might be, but this study doesn’t prove that.  It doesn’t prove much of anything.

Emotions are one of the best ways to bypass an otherwise well tweaked BSM. Knowing that, when a study makes us want to do a little superior dance we need that emotional response to trigger the BSM self-critical sub-circuit and apply extra stringent skepticism to it instead of just assuming it’s legitimate. If, unlike this one, it turns out to be legit, we can do a superior dance if we want to.

But we might want to do it briefly and in private, because even when sanctimony is justified it still makes us look like dicks.

Banana Man

It’s nine AM on a Sunday
The regular crowd shuffles in
With their bibles in hand they fill up the stands
I wish the girls showed some more skin

They say Kirk can you tell me a fairy tale
On TV and blogs and YouTube
Say something cute about tropical fruit
And prove scientists are the rubes

La la la de de da
la la duh duh duh duh dumb

Sing us a song you’re the banana man
Sing us a song tonight
Convince us that all the word’s scientists
Are wrong and the fundies are right

Dawkins is a famous biologist
Whose barbs cut me down like a knife
And he’s talking with Hitchins,
Who drinkin’ and bitchin’
The way that he did his whole life.

And there’s Darwin and Darrow and Feynman
And Russel and Randi and Penn
And Sagan and Sartre and Hemingway
But I’m smarter than all of those men.

La la la de de da
la la duh duh duh duh dumb
Sing us a song you’re the banana man
Sing us a song tonight
Convince us that all the word’s scientists
Are wrong and the fundies are right

It’s a pretty good crowd for a Sunday
And my manager gives me a smile
‘Cause he knows that it’s me they’ve been coming to see
To stoke their mouth-breathing and bile

And the church hall sounds like a carnival
And I really could use a cold beer
And they tell me I’m great and put cash in the plate
And I pray they don’t find out I’m queer.

La la la de de da
la la duh duh duh duh dumb
Sing us a song you’re the banana man
Sing us a song tonight
Convince us that all the word’s scientists
Are wrong and the fundies are right

The idea for this struck me this morning, and I cranked it out just now, so I may make a few revisions to it.

If anyone has the chops to play and sing like Billy Joel I’d love to see/hear a video of this.

Our improv troupe always spent a fair amount of time and effort designing and distributing posters, despite the fact that they increased show attendance by approximatly none.

Here’s one we did when for a show just before Easter.

(Click to see it full size)

Artwork: Harold Gosling

When someone truly evil dies it’s disappointing to know hell isn’t real. It would be satisfying to believe people like Saddam Hussein and Jerry Falwell are being roasted and tortured for eternity.

Alas, there is no evidence for that. But I believe there is a chance, just a slight one, that the universe can react to inexplicable evil. If something is wrong enough, vile enough, evil enough, and most importantly creates a profoundly profane perversion of something perfect and sacred, it will create enough stress in time and space that they very fabric of reality will tear open, creating, for a moment, a rift where everyone involved with the blasphemy will be sent to experience the most excruciating physical and emotional anguish any being can experience, until the last of the stars burn out.

I’m speaking, of course, of everyone involved with this.

Twenty thousand godless people gathered in Washington DC last weekend to celebrate and cheer and plan and just have a good time being with each other. I was one of them. Eventually there will be videos and DVDs available, but they won’t be as good as having been there.

Everyone will pick different speeches and performances as their favorites.  Here were a few of mine:

Jessica Ahlquist – I don’t remember being inspired by a 16 year old girl before. For those unfamiliar with her story, Jessica is a Rhode Island high school student who forced her school to obey the law and remove a prominently posted prayer. That put her on the receiving end of some incredibly vile and violent vitriol from Christens. It got so bad she was provided with police protection for a while.

State Representative Peter G. Palumbo thought serving his constituents included calling a teenage girl an “evil little thing” on talk radio. She responded by adopting the moniker  and a secular organization started printing “Evil Little Thing” T-shirts, with the profits going to a scholarship fund for her.

Jessica stood in front of 20,000 people and delivered a speech smoothly and without hesitation, a remarkable feat for a 16 year old. When she finished she was presented with a giant novelty check for over sixty-two thousand dollars, the amount in her scholarship fund, with “bravery” written in the memo field. It was a very satisfying poke in the eye to the hateful, violent Christens who had threated her.

Here’s a clip of the first part of her speech.

Adam Savage – There were lots of rah rah speeches throughout the day. Adam’s was one of the first and one of the best.

Tim Minchin – the second best way to change someone’s mind is with music. The first is with comedy. Tim combines both flawlessly. I’ve loved his stuff since I first saw him a couple of years ago, and seeing him perform in person was a real treat. Here’s a very NSFW clip of one of the songs he performed and the ASL interpreter who was doing speed bird flipping to keep up with him.  (If you haven’t heard him before, be sure to check him out on YouTube and elsewhere.  His songs are usually a bit more subtle than this.)

James Randi – Randi’s work was a huge part of me discarding woo and growing a brain way back when, so I’ve always had a lot of affection for him. It was great seeing him again.

Eddie Izzard – I don’t know how much of his act was prepared and how much was improvised, but it felt like he was making most of it up on the spot. It was brilliant – even better than “cake or death.”

The weather sucked. It would drizzle a bit, then rain hard for a few minute, then let up for a half hour, then start drizzling again. It was just cold enough to slowly suck the heat out of your bones. The predicted thunderstorms didn’t happen, though. God could have wiped out twenty thousand atheists, including most of the prominent leaders of the movement, with a single well placed lightening bolt. He screwed up. Either that, or he doesn’t exist.

There was a good mix of ages and ethnicities. When speakers asked students to raise their hands about half the people in the audience responded. That was encouraging.  As people get older and set in their ways it becomes more difficult to change their minds, especially on subjects they consider important. It felt great to see so many young people embrace reality and reject superstition.

One group brought bags full of peanut and jelly sandwiches for everyone. They had made the sandwiches and them put them back into the original plastic bread bags, which made them easy to carry and pass out among the crowd. I don’t know how many loaves of bread they used. Dozens? Hundreds? This is another example of why atheism can be more difficult than belief – if they were Christians they could have fed all 20,000 of us with five loaves and two fish fries.

Quite a few people had signs, but not nearly as many as I’ve seen at other rallies. They also were waved around less in the main audience, which was considerate of people standing behind the sign bearers. The two most popular ones were “Hey Mom, I’m an Atheist” and “This is What An Atheist Looks like.”

Giant puppets at rallies look stupid, so we were fortunate there was only one. And yes, it looked stupid.

Speaking of stupid, I was determined to say out of Stupidville and not engage with the village idiots who had gathered to protest our rally. There weren’t as many as I’d expected, but there were enough to be annoying if you were looking to be annoyed. They were standing on the sidelines, passing out tracts and arguing with anyone silly enough to engage them. I avoided the temptation, but accidentally got sucked into a conversation with one.

I saw an umbrella from the Saratoga Race Track, which is in my neck of the woods, and went over to talk to the guy holding it. He was debating with a fundy who who spewing the tired old argument, “you know someone designed that building over there, so then who designed us?” I foolishly joined the argument for about a few minutes, then chatted with the umbrella guy.  (He didn’t live near me.  It was a gift from an uncle who went to the track.) I spit one final point at the fundy, then left and continued my wanderings. The rally was such a happy occasion I didn’t want to taint it by wasting time with the mouth-breathers.

Three themes permeated the event.

One was the simple demand to be treated equally, and to stop allowing the religious to frame us as immoral or evil because we don’t share their superstitions.

Another was that the best way to achieve that goal is for atheists to come out of the closet. When someone with a poor opinion of atheists learns that someone they like and/or respect is one, it goes a long way toward combating the stereotype.

And finally, we must insist, absolutely insist, every single time it comes up, that religion be removed from government. Separation of church and state is vital for the freedoms of both atheists and religious people, not to mention all the people caught in the crossfire when laws are passed based on religious beliefs. (Witness the unconscionable laws being passed against women based on the fundies opposition to abortion.)

Looking at the world through the cold, clear, sometimes harsh and always amazing lens of reality is the only way to solve the multitude of problems we’re facing. It was wonderfully refreshing to spend a day with twenty thousand people who feel the same way. I left feeling like my batteries had been recharged.

Social media sites are infested with sayings plastered into graphics files. Most of them are trite, cliché, and/or stupid. The few that aren’t are diminished by such treatment.

If you’ve got something worth reading, just write it in regular text. Plain text retains the power of your words.  Slapping them into a graphics file dilutes their impact, except for the easily impressed (i.e. stupid), who probably aren’t your audience anyway.

Another annoying meme, which fortunately seems to be dying out, is people holding up paper with stuff written on it, partially obscuring their face. I was going to do one myself, with the text saying how stupid the meme was and how it trivialized the messages. While I was writing the copy I wondered if someone else had already done it. A quick search found someone who had. Thank you, whoever you are.  You just saved me a lot of work. (Click to enlarge.)

The food police have fired another salvo in the war against food choice.  This on is aimed at meat, with this ridiculous article in the LA times. The headline reads “All red meat is bad for you, new study says.” They include a link to the study, which is uncommon in this type of propaganda. The abstract makes it makes it incredibly easy to debunk.

…the pooled hazard ratio (HR) (95% CI) of total mortality for a 1-serving-per-day increase was 1.13 (1.07-1.20) for unprocessed red meat and 1.20 (1.15-1.24) for processed red meat. The corresponding HRs (95% CIs) were 1.18 (1.13-1.23) and 1.21 (1.13-1.31) for CVD mortality and 1.10 (1.06-1.14) and 1.16 (1.09-1.23) for cancer mortality.

A quick lesson may help those unfamiliar with epidemiology. The first number is the Risk Ratio. 1.13 means a 13% increase in risk. 1.0 would mean zero increase. The number in parentheses is the confidence interval (CI). It’s not exactly a margin of error, but works the same way. The 1.13 number might really be 1.07 or 1.20 or anything in between. If the CI includes 1.0 the results are not statistically significant.

In this study the results were barely statistically significant. Combine that with the fact it was based on surveys (a problematic approach that introduces recall bias) and the fact that any RR less than 2.0 is suspect because of the limitations of epidemiology, and the study proves….NOTHING. Nothing at all.

The article was honest enough to include this acknowledgment of the problems with basing studies on surveys:

Carol Koprowski, a professor of preventive medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine who wasn’t involved in the research, cautioned that it can be hard to draw specific conclusions from a study like this because there can be a lot of error in the way diet information is recorded in food frequency questionnaires, which ask subjects to remember past meals in sometimes grueling detail.

Of course, epidemiology never proves anything. It can’t, nor is it designed to. It simply provides an estimate of a probability. Smartenized people know estimates this small mean nothing. So do the professionals in the field:

“As a general rule of thumb, we are looking for a relative risk of 3 or more before accepting a paper for publication.” – Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”

“My basic rule is if the relative risk isn’t at least 3 or 4, forget it.” – Robert Temple, director of drug evaluation at the Food and Drug Administration.

“Relative risks of less than 2 are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or the effect of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident.” – The National Cancer Institute

“An association is generally considered weak if the odds ratio [relative risk] is under 3.0 and particularly when it is under 2.0, as is the case in the relationship of ETS and lung cancer.” – Dr. Kabat, IAQC epidemiologist

Note that numbers in this study are even lower than the nonsense second-hand smoke numbers Nicotine Nannies have used to vilify and marginalize smokers.

Pay attention, folks. You’re going to see more and more and more of this kind of junk science as the Food Fascists try to prevent you from making your own decisions about what you eat.

More Info:

Learn how epidemiology works.