Thoughts on science and not-science

PZ Myers posted this excellent video of a section of a standup routine by Dara O’Briain this week, and it covers a few points which I think are pretty pertinent. Here’s the clip:

So first of all, he says that lots of people have no idea about statistics and how they should be used, and subsequently incorrect information gets peddled out by the media. I mentioned this in a post a couple of weeks ago, that some basic skills in stats and probability wouldn’t go amiss and would probably allow some people to see past some superstitions. Next up, he criticises how the media tend to report both sides of a story in a totally uncritical way. The BBC are notorious for this! Every science story that goes up on their website has a few paragraphs at the end of it dedicated to a loony fringe belief with no substance, expecting the reader to make up their own mind with the limited information a 300 word article can provide! Take CERN, for example. The possibility that it could create a black hole which would destroy the planet was taken seriously by a large proportion of the public, even though nobody involved in CERN thought there was the slightest chance, simply because the media portrayed both sides of the story with no critical thought whatsoever.

But Dara hits some nails right on the head. “But there’s this notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who’s been a professor of dentistry for 40 years does not have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door!” Damn right! I can’t count the number of times in a discussion with an alternative medicine advocate or a religionist or something, I’ve made a good point and they’ve come back with “well that’s just your opinion”. Well yeah, it is my opinion, but if my opinion is backed up by evidence, and yours is your intuition or a story from a book, then I’m sorry, but mine is just better than yours! Show me some evidence and maybe I’ll start taking you seriously, but not until then.

But at 1.48 onwards he comes out with this gem: “but just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you can just fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you!” Damn right! We once had a Christian come to one of our meetings at the Student Humanist Society and say that we all needed to do some philosophy of science because what we know is always changing so we can’t be so sure about trusting in science, using this in some absurd sense to justify their belief in Christianity. How ridiculous! So was this person not only pinning their hopes on the things not yet explained by science as all gap-worshippers do, but also hoping that other things incompatible with Christianity like Darwinian evolution* would be proved wrong by future scientists?!

But this goes even deeper than that, it shows an ignorance of what science is. Science is not just a bunch of stuff that we know about the universe around us, it is largely a method, an evidence-based process by which we can find things out about the universe and everything in it. If current scientific knowledge is proven wrong in the future, it will be through the scientific method itself, win/win! When was the last time the faith-based approach led to a significant advancement in human knowledge? The faith-based approach gave us leeching, witch trials and homophobia, I don’t think we need to hear about anything more from where they came from.

So anyway, a round of applause for Dara!

An act of God?

The regime of nonsense up in the Hebrides are demonstrating their fundamentalist side once again. The first Sunday ferry from Stornoway to Ullapool is scheduled to take place tomorrow, not due to aggressive new atheist reformists as the nutters would probably have you believe (or maybe they’re so backwards they refuse to believe that the new atheists exist), but due to popular demand instead. However, the ferry that was originally going to carry out the crossing, called The Isle of Lewis, yesterday broke down with exhaust problems, and now of course they’re all saying that it’s an act of God. One warned that bad things will happen, saying that God has the power to sink a ferry (really? I’ve never seen him do anything). Personally I put this at about the same level of fundamentalism as the Bishop of Carlisle who said the flooding a few years ago was a punishment from God for our moral decadence, or the Westboro Baptists who claim the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s punishment for the “fag-enablers” amongst the American people. Pretty much the same thing on a different scale of offensiveness.

But let’s take a closer look, shall we? If God really wanted to show us puny humans and stop the Sunday ferry service, why didn’t he sink the bugger? Why didn’t he burn the ferry station to the ground like he did with Sodom and Gomorrah? Why didn’t he cause a massive storm every Sunday so the ferry would have to be cancelled? Something a bit more obvious than, you know, something that could’ve happened anyway. More importantly, why couldn’t he get the day right?  If it broke down on Sunday itself, maybe they might have some kind of basis for claiming that God is angry, but two days earlier? That’s just sloppy workmanship! What’s the point in serving a God who doesn’t even know what day of the week it is? As it is, another ferry is just going to do the crossing. Mistakes like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. I’m actually not surprised he got the day wrong, Christians can’t even get which day the Sabbath is right (hint: their stupid book says it’s Saturday).

If it was the work of God, well he’s certainly fucked up, hasn’t he? As one of the commenters on that story said, why didn’t he make one of the Somalian pirate ships break down? Why didn’t he do something useful? If he’s so concerned about keeping Sunday holy, why haven’t all the shops that are open on Sunday burnt down, or at least (seeing as he’s insistent on taking the lazy route and not doing much at all) come across a series of complications on Sunday that they don’t encounter for the rest of the week? (What happened to you God? You used to be cool. You used to be all about the fire.) It’s so stupid that these nutcases think they can interpret the mind of a nonexistent entity through the malfunctions of seabound public transport systems.

But I do find this line of reasoning a bit weird. It’s a perverse version of the kind of logic people try to use to justify their belief in God, similar to in this video. You’ve probably heard it before, something like “oh I believe in God because I prayed that I would get a new job/get better again and I did.”  But usually this is only used if good things happen, because otherwise bad things happening would be evidence that God didn’t exist, or that God was evil. They don’t normally mention the bad things because it works against their argument.  It’s kind of like a conscious recall bias. But here the bad things are evidence that God does exist and that he’s angry. Whatever happened to this all loving God who’s waiting to take me into his arms if I just say the word? When did this God turn to doing bad things to prove (or rather not prove) his existence? How does an omnibenevolent being even do bad things?

But like I say, the ferry’s going ahead, and a small amount of normality will return to people’s Sunday lives. Hey, here’s an idea? Why don’t we let people sign a contract saying they want to observe the Sabbath on Sunday, and then if their house burns down, or they need an air ambulance, we can just say no because that’s work. Or, even better, why don’t we charge the Sabbatarians with false imprisonment. They’ve been keeping people cooped up on their island one day a week for how long now? Hmm… food for thought.

Guns and bars don’t mix

Check out this video from the BBC, I don’t think it’ll let me embed it. A woman is claiming that her having a gun with her in the bar could’ve saved her husband’s life, after a stalker followed her into the bar where she runs a karaoke night and shot her husband dead earlier this year. This comes ahead of a new law which will allow registered gun users in Tennessee to carry loaded guns into bars and restaurants.

Now I didn’t really care until she came out with this line about halfway through the video: “you know I don’t care so much, about a bad guy’s life. I’m sorry, I don’t. They make the choice to do evil. That’s their choice.” To me this indicates a naive black and white perception of people, categorizing them into good and evil, as if it’s that simple.

So let’s look at her claims. Well, I’m skeptical that her having a gun would’ve saved her husband in the first place. Let’s say her stalker walks into the bar and suddenly pulls a gun. It takes half a second to kill her husband. Then she reaches for her gun and he shoots her as well, and we’ve got (at least) two body bags on the way out of the building. Having an extra gun there just escalates the situation needlessly.

But this is just this one relatively rare scenario where a stalker goes out looking to kill. What would happen to ordinary situations if guns were introduced? A guy’s at the bar and catches another guy checking out his girlfriend. Ordinarily if he’s had a few drinks he might go over and punch the guy in the face, but if he’s got a gun, there’s the possibility he’ll pull it, and then we’ve got a dead guy instead of a guy with a black eye, and then his friend pulls and gun and gets involved, and we’ve got how many dead people instead of one guy with a black eye. How many drunken disagreements and fights do you see in bars? Would you want to add guns to that situation? It may only be registered gun users who can take them in but so what? Who’s going to be checking on the door of every bar whether they have registration documents for their weapon, and it’s not like it’s difficult to be a registered user anyway!

Here’s the one I’m most concerned about though. A guy’s had a few too many and the barman refuses to give him any more. He takes this as a personal insult, as has happened several times to me personally, and pulls a gun. Is there any less appropriate place to allow guns than in a place that serves alcohol? When will this wannabe cowboys realise that having more guns is never going to solve the problem? All you have to do is look at their gun crime figures and see that most of those situations could’ve been prevented or would’ve been considerably less deadly if there’d been no guns involved at all.

Tackling superstition

Apologies it’s been so long, but I’m crazy busy working every day and don’t  have a lot of time. I spend a lot of my space on this blog bashing religion, but I should specify that I don’t think religion is the main problem. Religion is in turn fed by irrationality and superstition, I think weeding out this root cause could solve a lot of the problems we have today.

I spend a lot of time talking with the people at my new job, not least because a large proportion of them speak Spanish and I like to practice. One of my colleagues provided an example of such irrationality at work. She said that she took her flatmate to the bank machine to take out rent money, and after he withdrew the money, he folded the notes over, and a number handwritten on the outside note was the exact same number as the amount of money he’d withdrawn. “How do you explain that?” she said smugly.

My response was to ask her how many times she’d taken money out, folded it up and there was a different number written on the outside note, or how many times there hadn’t been any number written on the note. A statistically unlikely event will still happen if you repeat the situation an excessive number of times, and that doesn’t make it a coincidence, much less a supernatural event.

Dawkins goes through a similar idea in one or other of his books, which I’ll paraphrase here. A TV psychic looks into the camera and tells the audience to look at their watches and clocks, proudly declaring that someone’s will stop right at that second, and that they should call in. 5 minutes later, a few people are calling in, amazed that he was correct. I mean, what are the odds that my watch would just happen to stop right when he told me it would, that’s amazing!

Except that it’s not. If millions of people are watching and they’re each looking at several timepieces, the odds of one of them stopping aren’t all that huge. Next we have people saying “my watch didn’t stop just then, but I was speaking to my aunt in Canada and hers did stop just then, she’s across on the other side of the world and wasn’t even watching, that’s amazing!” Except it’s not. If we’re now including not only the millions of people who are watching but all their friends and relatives that aren’t, then the Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental (PETWHAC) just grew significantly, but conversely it seems more amazing that a watch belonging to someone who wasn’t even watching had stopped.

So, how do we tackle such basic superstition? Fortunately I think the education system can do a lot of the work for us.

I suggest we start with a basic education in statistics and probability. I’m not hot at all on statistics but I have the basics and it helps a lot. There’s a lot of logic that goes along with it too which often isn’t emphasised. For example, just because there are two possibilities, doesn’t mean that they are equally likely. Most mathematical problems used to teach probability involve 10 different coloured balls in a bag pulled at random, but this is only useful for illustrating equally likely outcomes. There isn’t, as some apologists seem to think, a 50/50 chance that God exists, just because he either does or he doesn’t. A building either stays up or falls down, that does not mean that there’s a 50/50 chance that it’ll fall down at any given moment.

A knowledge of the scientific method would also go down well. My friend wouldn’t have made her silly mistake if she’d known about recall and confirmation bias (she only remembered the time there was a number, and not the hundreds of times there wasn’t), both of which need to be accounted for when we’re practicing science. Put Philosophy of Science on the school science syllabus! This will also make sure everyone knows why clinically controlled trials are essential in proving the efficacy of a treatment, why randomization, blinding and placebo controls are important, and hopefully get rid of people’s faith in unproven alternative medicines. Win/win.

Last but not least, we need to foster an environment of critical thinking. I took a Critical Thinking class at school. It was terrible. We got a history teacher who barely knew the first thing about the subject for a single session a week for 40 minutes, and all he did was teach us what a non-sequitor was (which I could’ve figured out from my Latin class) every week, and we’d mess around for the rest of it. If that was taught properly, that would’ve been the most valuble class I could have taken. But then I suppose Catholic schools aren’t too keen on having rational critically thinking students, are they? Fortunately I’m happy to hear that Critical Thinking will be going on the GCSE syllabus.

As a final thought, remember that dwindling church attendance numbers are not in themselves good news, since lots of these people are losing faith in organised religion simply to go into New Age bollocks or become superstitious and just believe in ’something’. We need to tackle the root cause, not just one of it’s branching weeds.