Extreme thoughts on Romney's extreme words

I wonder if I'll see the most one-sided US Presidential election in the sixteen years of my life I've been cognizant of national politics.

The single event that prompts this thought is Mitt Romney's now-infamous response to the attack that killed four Americans in a US Embassy in Cairo. Brief background: A (rotten-looking, as it happens) anti-Muslim film was previewed in the Internet, and in response to it, Muslim protestors started gathering around US embassies in Libya and Egypt. One of the embassies dismissed most staff early as a precaution, and released what may be called anti-anti-Muslim statements intended to lower tensions. Sometime after this, both embassies were violently attacked and four people died at the Cairo one, including a US Ambassador. Secretary of State Clinton made a standard but well-done statement of shock and condolences. Then Romney did something no one predicted: he accused the Obama administration of “sympathizing” with the attackers.

So what’s the deal there? It seems that the non-apologetic statements, made by the embassy (not cleared by the White House), before the attacks, are being confused for apologetic and terrorist-supportive statements, made by Obama, after the attacks. Easy mistake, anyone could make it.. yeccch, it’s not even easy to be sarcastic about this now.

So, really, what’s the deal here? New York Magazine may have the best analysis: Romney’s central talking point about Obama’s foreign policy has been the “apologizing for America” thing (about which I had been planning to write another post, but everything’s changed now), and he made the mistake of thinking that point could be applied willy-nilly any time the White House used the usual diplomacy, even after an incident of violence. Of course, the “apology tour” thing lies on the road that everytually leads to Frothingville, Neoconia, a village whose inhabitants never visit the creepy old castle in which lives Count Obama, Kenyan Muslim atheist elitist vampire. At this point, Romney's best hope may be to don yet another role from his ever-changing wardrobe: Van Helsing.

All in all, I can’t help but wonder, what do these people expect Obama to do with regards to America's relationship with the Muslim world? It’s as if they want him to be a living Jack Chick tract, thumping his chest, shoving Jesus and American flags down the world’s throat. His predecessor gets a pass for never showing explicit anti-Muslim tendencies in response to 9/11 because his name was, well, “George Bush”. But a “Barack Obama” had better burn a couple Korans if he wants any respect from the frothers. I’m very morbidly curious how the Romney team would respond to Obama burning a Koran -- surely they couldn’t couldn’t criticize it without both looking hypocritical and losing the few wingnuts whose votes they still have?

Regardless of all that, there is one small point on which I find myself disagreeing with the response to Romney by both the White House and other folks, which is to criticize him for "politicizing the attack". This is a wrongheaded spin in a couple ways.

First of all, nearly everything everyone says is in fact political to someone, especially in contexts like this one. Condemning an attack is political, saying nothing about religion is political, saying Islam is Bad or Islam is Good or Islam is the Pause that Refreshes is political. And there's nothing wrong with reponding to someone's words, whatever those words are, with "political" talk. Hey, if in fact Obama had said anything at all like what Romney accuses him of, then Romney would have every right to "go political" on him. (Of course in that case it would be Obama and not Romney whose feet were on the fire; the political analysis would be that Obama had practically handed Romney the election.)

Secondly, labeling Romney's words as "politicizing the attack" sound like a resignation to a world in which this sort of bile is politics as usual -- as if what Romney had said were something like "This attack goes to show that Obama's foreign policies fail to keep us safe". That would be one bit of Romneyish inanity, justifiably forgotten in a week. It's an act of a different caliber, to accuse the President of actually saying that murdering Americans because some other Americans insulted your faith is reasonable behavior. Shame on Mitt.

A Monty Hall reductio ad absurdum

I wonder if most Internet users, by this time, are familiar with the Monty Hall problem.

I'm going to assume that whoever reading this is. So…

SPOILER ALERT

… the answer for the classical version is that the intuitive answer, "Might as well stay", is wrong.

A simple argument as to why your win rate from staying is 1/3 is: you only had a 1/3 chance to be right in the first place, so if you always stay, you'll win only 1/3 of the time. Naysayers will respond with something like "Yes, but that was before the second door was opened. Monty opening another door changes the game, and the chances on each door are now 1/2."

Here's a reductio ad absurdum argument I came up with for why it can't be fifty-fifty just because there are two doors left.

1. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that in the classical Monty Hall puzzle, the probability of containing a car is in fact 1/2 for both the contestant's original door and the remaining closed door. (The standard intuitive answer.)

2. Given that, then a player who always stays should expect to win about half of his games, not much more or fewer.

(If someone hedges on this, then they're possibly confused. They may think that it's "1/3 either way", but can't explain what's going on with the other third. Now, in some variants of the problem, that other third refers to situations in which Monty randomly reveals a car. It may also refer to situations in which Monty chooses not to open another door at all, instead saying "Congratulations, you won a goat!" But in the classical version, both of these outcomes are forbidden.

Another possible source of confusion is a sense in which committing beforehand to staying, instead of choosing after the goat has been revealed, will somehow make it a fundamentally different game, odds-wise. I'm not sure how to address that.)

3. Meet John. John is going to play the game 300 times and he will always stay. He expects to win about 150 games. (John has the same views as most newcomers to this puzzle.)

4. Meet Mary. Mary is going to play a less interesting version of the game, in which no second door is opened. She will simply choose one of three doors, and if her chosen door has the car, she wins; otherwise she loses. She will play 300 times and naturally expects to win 100 games.

(If someone disagrees with this, then they're probably under a very stange apprehension that the odds are fifty-fifty because "You either win the car or you don't." Some of these same people apply this sad logic to lottery tickets, and I have no idea how to persuade them out of it.)

5. So, John has just played his 300 games, and Mary played her 300 games. (I won't tell you how often they won because that's very close to the key point.) John and Mary now join forces to become a team, as is sometimes done on certain game shows. They will play 300 games together. Here's the way it will work: First, they discuss until they agree on a door, and tell the host which one they choose. Then, Mary will be blindfolded, and the host will open one of the other doors hiding a goat, revealing it to John. (The door and the goat are both silent, so Mary has no way of knowing which door was opened.) The host closes the door, and Mary's blindfold is removed. John is not allowed to indicate to Mary which door had been opened. Finally, the big reveal: John and Mary's original door is opened. (They don't get the chance to switch, because we only want to test the sticking strategy.)

6. So, how often should they win? Looking at it from John's perspective the game is basically the same as the one he had played before, so if the intuitive answer is correct, Team John-and-Mary should win about 150 games. But from Mary's perspective, it's the same as the games she had played before, so they should only win 100!

If someone doesn't see the light from this, it should prove very fascinating to try to isolate which condition(s) of the game they think are responsible for improving Mary's original 100 wins to John's original (actually very unlikely) 150 wins.

Is it the knowledge that at least one of the other doors hides a goat? But Mary already had that knowledge, based on the simple fact that there are two goats and only one "chosen door". She still only wins 100 of the 300 games she plays by herself, where no second door is opened.

So is it the knowledge of which door the host opened? But John holds that information while Mary does not! Which player's mental model "wins"? If it's John's, because the knowledge trumps the ignorance, then what if he plays with 99 blindfolded people; will the effect of their ignorance on the win rate overcome the effect of his knowledge? (And the same question in reverse if one thinks that Mary's ignorance determines the win rate.)

Perhaps the win rate will fall in between the two, at 125 out of 300. But that doesn't make much sense. We again have to ask what happens if you add more blindfolded players, or more un-blindfolded ones.

Maybe what matters is the degree of knowledge held by a person who has an actual stake in the game. For example, if John were blindfolded while the host shows a goat to the audience, then closes a door, John will still only win 1/3 of the time (it's just like a trivia show in which the correct answer flashes on the screen while the contestant is thinking) whereas if John gets to see the goat first, then he'll win 1/2 the time. But to suggest that that's how it works is magical thinking. John makes no decisions after picking the door initially, so informing him and/or the audience before opening his door won't help him play the game any better.

Maybe what makes a difference is whether or not the goat door is still physically open when the contestant's door is opened? So if the door is closed again, then the game "resets". But this, too, is magical thinking; if I know a door is empty then it can't possibly matter if it's currently closed or open. Such thinking approaches what babies supposedly believe about peek-a-boo, that when Daddy's face isn't visible it means Daddy has literally vanished. (I myself doubt it's that simple with babies, but that's another story.)

Finally, it's possible that a naysayer perceives the existence of the option to switch as being crucial to the fifty-fifty odds. Without that choice, one would only win 1/3 of the time, but if you are given the option and decide to stay, then you'll win 1/2 of the time.* This, again, is nonsense; the car can't move around just because the host says "Would you like this door instead?" Also, you can just re-do the whole above argument but with both John and Mary always switching instead. (Though it may be harder to work out what's going on given then the act of switching to the third door should give away to Mary which one had been opened as the second door. Does she just stay blindfolded the whole time? Do they both have to agree on the switch? If yes and yes, then it's just like the regular version, and switching will be the superior strategy.)

Ultimately, I hope I've make it clear that the rigmarole of opening another door cannot affect your odds of having picked correctly to begin with. If you get this, you should feel like the problem isn't so weird after all.

* I have a private view that part of what is going on with people's refusal to switch is a reluctance to "let go of" a car. Switching from a door that hides a car to one that does not feels like losing a car in a way that sticking with a vacant door, when switching would have won, does not. People then justify this desire-based intuition by arguing about probabilities; they're really talking about what things feel like, almost thinking in terms of Murphy's law ("With my luck, switching means I'll lose every time!"). Supporting this claim is the fact that nearly everyone chooses to stay while still arguing that it's fifty-fifty.

Interestingly, we can model people's loss aversion by creating a version of the game in which, if the contestant switches away from the car, she actually loses an entire car of her own. (Say she starts out with 100 cars, so she has something to lose.) In this case, the expected value from switching-versus-staying really is identical. If you always switch, then every three games, you win an average of two cars but lose one car, but if you always stay, you simply win one car per three games — a net of one car either way, plus the "staying" option is less nerve-wracking.

They shouldn't have used a Quick-Quotes Quill

Having recently watched the DVD of the final Harry Potter film, I just noticed some rather awful writing on the back of the penultimate DVD's box. Its summary begins: "Harry, Ron and Hermione set out on their perilous mission to track down and destroy the secret to Voldemort's immortality and destruction — the Horcruxes." It's bad enough if you understand what Horcruxes are, but this sentence makes things especially confusing for those who don't. Why's that?

Well, it's true that Horcruxes are "the secret to Voldemort's immortality" and also that they are "the secret to his destruction", but in completely different senses of being "the secret to" the thing in question. The former sense is one of providing an explanation for why something is the way it is. The second is about assisting someone in bringing about a certain end (and it's a less common use of the word).

As it is, one is forced to interpret these qualities (immortality and destruction) as sharing this "secret" in the same way, which results in nonsense. Is the summary saying that Horcruxes are the secret to how Voldemort "acquired immortality", and also how he (later on?) "acquired destruction"? Great, that means the bad guy is out of the way! Or, wait, is it supposed to mean that Horcruxes are the secret means by which the heroes hope to bring about Voldemort's destruction, and also the means by which they hope to bring about his immortality? Make up your minds, silly wizards!

Anyway, there's a simple fix someone could have applied if they'd noticed this — just add a word like "key" which means the same thing as "secret" in this instance. Also, for the heck of it, I'd remove the repetition of "destroy" and "destruction". Here's my new, improved first sentence:

Harry, Ron and Hermione set out on their perilous mission to find and destroy the secrets of Voldemort's immortality and the keys to defeating him— his Horcruxes.

Reparo!

Another sadness courtesy of prayer

I've heard Christian after Christian worry about their praying; whether they do it often and sincerely enough. They may describe prayer as their weakest suit in their Christianity. This depresses me. It's a inevitable result of there being an activity which is praised from all corners, yet whose process is rarely specified, whose techniques are disputed from one practitioner to another, whose results are predicted to very different degrees of confidence, then inevitably rationalized. Not to mention the discrepancies in different prayers’ experience — some people simply lack the “talking inner voice” or “inner other person” which others have. When you reify that voice into something more, into an actual deity or Spirit, it’s as if the same person loves talking to all those people but for some reason ignores you. It’s like feeling bad about yourself for not having flying dreams. Why can’t I fly? Am I not trying hard enough? And the worst of it is that some of the people who do experience the voice insist that indeed, you’re not trying hard enough.

There exist Christians who lambaste one another for praying incorrectly, and there are those who tolerate pretty much the entire gamut of praying-related attitudes — except, perhaps, the smiling affirmation of not praying at all. One finds contempt especially for the notion that prayer is no different than what it would be if God didn't exist, ie, prayer is not any kind of connection to God nor anything that God remotely cares about, it's just a kind of talking to oneself or (when spoken publicly) to other human beings. (This notion, interestingly, is almost synonymous with atheism, rather like how the disbelief in an omnimax god can be synonymous with atheism. In both cases, God can be defined in other ways, but usually is not.)

Come to think of it, it's rather like conventional attitudes about food. People get into tense debates over what they and others should and shouldn't eat (on grounds of taste, nutrition, and culture), while still other people accept the existence of every imaginable diet — but there's a definite consensus that everyone ought to eat something, if they want to be a healthy, complete person. And people can feel stressed that they’re not eating right, but I don’t think it’s as frequent. A key difference is that our understanding of food largely reflects the evidence (especially the conclusion that it is necessary for survival). And unlike with prayer, one can adjust one’s diet in accordance with the experts without finding nearly as much disagreement among them. (Well, maybe the same amount of disagreement, but perhaps that’s owing to the sheer diversity of food.)

I don't really think there's any solution to the problem except to advocate the attidute I described earlier: Prayer simply doesn't matter. Isn't that wonderful? (And supposing God does exist, wouldn't that make so much more sense, as other atheists have pointed out?)

Incuriosity made double

Early in 2011, Bill O'Reilly told his atheist guest that science could not explain tides, ergo God.



The thing that most interests and depresses me about that is not O'Reilly's obvious ignorance, or his god-of-the-gaps argument. It's the lack of curiosity betrayed by that statement. And not just curiosity about the cause of tides, but curiosity about what scientists think causes tides. I'm talking about Bill O'Reilly's mental model of the scientists' mental model of tides. Did he have one? I doubt it. He wasn't remotely interested in contemplating the scientists as full human beings.

A real human being whose work deals with tides might naturally become curious about their cause. Yet not O'Reilly's model of a geophysicist, who is instead interested in nothing but furthering The Atheist Agenda. When an O'Reilly-geophysicist sees a mystery, she sees nothing more than a gap to keep God out of. Or, perhaps, she worriedly sees a gap God could fill, and does her best to ignore it altogether, denying the elephant in the ocean.

Yes, I'm accusing God-of-the-Gaps O'Reilly of a kind of inverse projection. I think there's an extent to which he sees people whose gut answer is not God as having a gut answer (and a sole answer) of "Not God!" (Heck, I may myself be projecting, given that I'm stereotyping O'Reilly's stereotype, but I won't let that stop me.)

Now I'll use myself as the Gallant to Bill's Goofus. Many times in my life, I've encountered (or re-considered) a seemingly strange idea in Christianity — the Trinity, the eucharist, prayer. In each case, I've experienced an impulse of curiosity about just how Christians conceptualize these things. What is it like to be a Christian looking at yet another double-blind study that prayer failed to pass? What's it like to be a young Catholic receiving first Communion — are you worried you'll taste flesh and blood and spit it out? And though I may instinctively consider the trinity nonsense, I don't assume that Christians fail to think about it at all. In fact, I know that they debate its nature almost as vociferously today as did the attendees of the first Council of Nicaea.

Of course, in some cases, I may be projecting my own curiosity. So far as I can tell, there's a wide range of attitudes, while some theists wrestle with this stuff, others don't really bother pondering their faith's tenets or examining its puzzles, so much as associating positive feelings with them ("All I know is that the trinity is a blessed mystery."). However, for every organized religion, there is a tradition of theology, because that's the sort of thing people like to do; we just didn't use that impulse of ours to full effect until developing science.

To phrase all this in a straight-up moral, it's this: Don't assume that because an idea is (seemingly) baloney, it's an actual black box in the mind of its adherents. Your model of the raw details of some idea, like evolution or communism or libertarianism, is likely rather different from that of its adherents (or opponents). Just as it can be good to assume good faith despite that not being a human universal, so too should we assume curiosity if the person's name isn't Bill O'Reilly.

Anyway, when he was told via Internet that the main cause of tides is the moon, he asked "How'd the moon get there? What put it there?" A pretty straightforward admission that his initial question was purely rhetorical (not that it wasn't already obvious); he doesn't give a damn about the ocean or the moon, the poor soul.

This is another hazard of incuriosity — sometimes your "rhetorical" questions turn out to have answers which you didn't bother to look up because you assumed they didn't exist. (Like if I were to assume that Christians have no answer to the Problem of Evil. Turns out they do, just not good ones.) What he really meant was to pose the First Cause argument; he just screwed up on his placement of the Inexplicability Boundary, about as much as if he'd asked if scientists can possibly explain the origin of Fox News. Every time he said scientists "couldn't explain" the origins of the sun or stars, it was another knife in my gut. He doesn't care! He doesn't care about the truth of anything! Was he ever even a child?

Now, O'Reilly's ignorance may be an extreme example, because just about everyone knows the moon causes tides (though people often confuse tides with waves, but that's another story). It makes my point for precisely that reason, though — so that just about everyone can understand.

A much more common instance of what I'm talking about would be many a creationist's take on evolution. The question "Why are there still monkeys?" is asked by people who actually want to know the answer even less often than is the question "How are you?" Again, the assumption on their part is that scientists flinch from the hard stuff instead of wrestling it to the ground. By extension, most of evolutionary science must be about inventing plausible- (or implausible-) sounding stories for the primary purpose of keeping God out of the picture.

But if I were a creationist, then in addition to yelling "Contradiction! Contradiction!", I would wonder how in the world scientists resolved the contradictions in their own minds. Such as it is, I can't help but wonder if the creationists project an inversion of their own way of thinking onto scientists, so that Origin of Species = Holy Bible, etc. (Except they know that scientists know of all the things that have since modified our view from Darwin's but they figure that not getting it all right the first time is a flaw in the system.)

The most common assumption here, and one that bugs the heck out of me, is that the only possible alternative to a given Holy Book is a complete postmodern free-for-all. I've seen theists and postmodernists argue the same thing! "Oh, you're just another religion, because you believe that X is definitely true. So there." Or: "Without going by the Bible, you must be using human reason, which means just making it up as you go along." Give me a break.

I must echo my favorite atheist blogger, Greta Christina: Why does no one tell a version of the blind-men-and-elephant-story whereby the men compare notes to learn what a real elephant actually is?

It seems there's something counter-intuitive about the idea of assembling a worldview derived from direct (or indirect) observation of reality, instead of the acceptance of authority or acceptance of your own whims. Is learning really that scary? I hope not.

Oh, and since I posted the video, I feel obligated to comment on the atheist guy. I thought he did a decent job, but what he should have said to recover ground from O'Reilly's attacks is that even the world's most intelligent person can be taken by the scam of religion (so calling religion a scam is therefore not an insult to anyone's intelligence, not that that makes the argument false, of course). Plus, of course, he could have emphasized the fact that the threat of Hell is outright bullying, never mind insulting, although he did only have a few minutes. Is there a phrase for l'esprit d'escalier felt for someone else?

A common canard causes me to cry for curiosity

"Sure, religion doesn't have all the answers. But scientists don't know what caused the Big Bang!"

When was the last time you heard of a theologian or a New Ager researching the possible origins of God/Spirit?

When was the last time you heard of a cosmologist researching the possible origins of the universe?

What about such questions as: "Where did life come from?" and "How does the mind work?"

See the difference?

For the record, the theological answers to the questions posed on this page are:
1. God is without cause by definition
2. The universe was created by God, who used a process of creation (basically, he can will things into existence) to create it
3. Life was created by God, who used a process of creation to create it
4. Minds work by being minds, you know, with free will and such

Conversely, when it comes to those last three questions, a TLDR version of the relevant scientists' answers would be "We don't yet know for certain, but have have some very good guesses (hypotheses A, Q, X, etc) and we're in the process of testing them." (Or, "That's a very big and vague question, and you'll need to specify exactly what you mean.")

One possible rebuttal (to my insinuation of the superiority of the scientific approach to accessing truth) is that when it comes to resolving certain profound mysteries, scientists are wasting their time. The lack of curiosity betrayed by this view only further illustrates my point. (And it's depressing, too.)

Science versus nonsensisms

I originally began this piece with just religion in mind but some months afterward, I wrapped it up with other varieties of “woo” in mind.

When theists take part in “science-vs-religion” arguments, they tend to try one of two things:

1. Show religion to be useful in the way science is useful.

2. Show science to be useless in the way religion is useless.

The second one sounds silly, but it’s actually a much more popular line of argument these days.

Examples of the first one would be: “Albert prayed for rain and it rained”, or “Sarah used the Bible Code to predict the stock market with breathtaking accuracy.” This contingent of arguments is pursued by a large minority, but tends to make more “sophisticated” believers cringe, because they are all too aware of what religion’s track record in those areas really looks like when an actual empiricism is applied. Hence, sophisticated theists prefer variations of the second line of argument.

The second line of argument involves many phrases which have become canards. “Scientists have faith too.” “Scientists still don’t know (the origin of the universe)/(the basis of mathematics)/(how to cure the common cold).” (And non-scientists do?) “Science is really another religion, with its own close-minded hierarchy of orthodoxy-defending priests.” “Science doesn’t answer the questions that matter.”

It’s been pointed out that the “Science (and/or atheism) is another faith” argument is generally delivered in an oddly sneering tone, rather than the welcoming tone with which theists usually praise such things as faith and religion. However, this is not entirely an inconsistency on the theists’ part. Rather, the argument as a whole is that something-like-faith is inescapable — all assertions about reality are “faith-based” in some non-trivial way. Hence, science has no better claim to “truth” than anyone else, at least empirically and in certain bodies of knowledge (especially those which directly concern us humans, like how our minds work). Then, within the realm of this thing called “faith”, one finds not only science but a plethora of religions. Now, since all these worldviews are really faith-based, one must use faith-based means to tease them apart and rank their efficacy. The “faith” criterion first makes the Bible is as good as a science textbook, after which some other faith-based criteria (which are almost never specified) render it superior.

In the course of that last paragraph, we drifted away from “sophisiticated” theists to the thinking of the hard-core literalists, but this is partly in keeping with the actual continuum of mindsets, ranging from a genial NOMA (Non-Overlapping MAgisteria), to a mild distaste for but resignation to science, to an outright declaration that one’s religious method serves as superior to the current scientific method. (I say “current” because different literalists will differ on the subject of whether science itself is at fault, or whether current institutions, a different beast from “real” science, are simply doing science incorrectly.)

When one pursues the arguments long enough, the fuzzy, “deep” wording must either vanish or give way to more concrete assertions, because a true discussion cannot be had with fuzz. If the only response recieved is “Whatever works for you, man”, then there is little that can follow such a rejection of truth in favor of an inconsistent politeness. For example, is my skepticism as valid as your credulity, or is it only the world’s relgions, spiritualities, and psuedosciences that earn this gracious acceptance? Often, it seems the answer is that everyone except atheist rationalists are okay (despite apparent contradictions among all the other groups) because “you have to believe in something.” Specifically, in something whose actual existence can only be believed in and never shown — solely believing in the apparently real stuff makes you boring and/or intolerant.

It’s like insisting that everyone root for a sports team, and it doesn’t matter which team or what sport, so long as the players and equipment are invisible, inaudible, and otherwise beyond the realm of empirical detectability. Cold materialists, why do you hate the Fighting Unicorns so?