All posts by Andrew Arensburger

Costly Signaling for Lay Skeptics

This was originally posted at Secular Perspectives.

Let’s say you’re an average person, of average intelligence, average education, with an average job, and you’ve run across several news articles.

One says that an asteroid has just been detected that will hit the earth in 2015. Another says that taking vitamin B3 daily can improve your cholesterol levels. A third says that increasing defense spending will help balance the budget. Another says that evidence of extraterrestrial life has been found in an Antarctic meteorite. A fifth one says that the Gospel of Mark has been dated as having been written between 40 and 50 CE. And finally, a story that people who prayed to a statue of Krishna have been cured of cancer and blindness.

How do you, as a lay person with a full-time day job, determine which ones to believe, and which ones to disregard?

I don’t have a good answer, by the way. I’m hoping you can suggest something in the comments.

All such articles are trying to “sell” you an idea, in a broad, general sense. Sometimes the selling is literal, as when a company tries to convince you that you’re a pathetic malodorous loser who’ll never be accepted by the in-crowd or find true love unless you buy their product. Other times, it’s metaphorical: “I want you to know this, because…” well, that’s the question, isn’t it? “Because we’ll all benefit if people who will implement these ideas get elected.” “Because I’ll make a ton of money if you help elect people who’ll implement these ideas.” “Because I care about you and your health.” “Because this will help save your soul from eternal damnation.” “Because this idea, while bland, is true, and I think it’s better if we know the truth.”

It would be great if there were a single source to which one could turn to to get the truth, or if news articles came with a little checkmark, the way Twitter shows that “neilhimself” is the famous Neil Gaiman, while “NeilGaiman” is someone else. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The problem is that true ideas and false ideas can look an awful lot like each other.

But it occurs to me that nature has come up with a solution to this problem. In sexual species, males often try to communicate that “you should mate with me; I’ll provide our offspring with plenty of food, and they’ll be resistant to parasites and predation.” In such cases, it’s often advantageous to lie: a male who convinces a female he’s in it for the long haul can impregnate her, then ditch her to impregnate someone else. Preferably while some other male sucker gets stuck caring for the liar’s offspring.

So what’s a female to do? How does she figure out who’s serious about helping to feed the kids, and who’s just trying to get inside her cloaca? One solution is known as costly signaling. “Signaling” refers to the “I’ve got great genes” message, above. The “costly” part means that the signal should be sent in a way that’s difficult or expensive (in time, effort, ability, etc.) to fake. The usual example is that of the peacock, who demonstrates his worth by the fact that he’s managed to survive despite having a huge, flashy tail that prevents him from flying, and hinders escape from predators. If he’s managed to overcome such a handicap, he must have superior genes indeed.

The idea of costly signaling is more general than that: it basically means that the signaler has to invest enough effort or resources into the communication to be taken seriously, that cheating isn’t worth it.

(As an aside, I can think of a few possible instances in human society: an engagement ring sends the message that “I’m willing to spend a pile of money on a small rock; so I’m in this for the long haul, not just for a quick fling”. Taking a prospective client to dinner or to a ball game says “We don’t do this for just anyone; but we’re willing to do what it takes to get your business.” And an Italian sports car and designer clothes say “I have so much money that I can afford to waste it on an expensive logo. Of course I’ll be able to feed our family and send our kids to college.”)

So getting back to my original point, it might be possible to identify costly signals to distinguish trustworth news sources from untrustworthy ones.

For instance, was the article published by a major news outlet, or by some local paper you’ve never heard of? In principle, the greater the reputation of the publication, the more editors and fact-checkers it has had to pass through to get published. Unfortunately, given the state of American journalism, this may not be as safe an assumption as one might hope.

A related criterion might be: do they have a fancy web site, or does it look like it was slapped together by someone’s kid in the 1990s? Unfortunately, this doesn’t work at all, since organizations like Americans for Prosperity, BP, and Answers in Genesis can easily afford good web designers.

Do the authors have letters after their name? An article on medicine written by an MD, or an article on science written by a Ph.D. is probably more trustworthy than one written by a beat reporter. The time and effort required to go through grad school or med school to obtain those letters should weed out the fakers.

Of course, the competence has to be in a relevant field: I tend to trust what Paul Krugman writes about the economy, because he has a degree and a Nobel prize in economics, but not if he writes about, say, medicine or geology.

And, of course, it’s very easy to just say that one has a Ph.D., or to buy a degree from a diploma mill, without putting in the effort to learn a subject well enough to speak authoritatively about it. To combat this, there accreditation institutes that investigate schools and give their stamp of approval to the ones that require students to learn something before graduating. Of course, now that a lot of people have learned to ask “is your degree from an accredited school?”, there are accreditation mills, which will accredit any diploma mill for a fee.

Has the author published any peer-reviewed research? Peer review is intended as a filter to make sure that research journals don’t publish any old garbage. This criterion is probably pretty good, though not flawless. For one thing, it usually requires effort on the reader’s part to seek out the author’s publication record. For another, various creationist organizations publish cargo-cult “peer-reviewed” journals where articles are reviewed by a panel of fellow creationist before publication.

Trusted endorsements: this might be called the poor man’s peer review. When Phil Plait, an astromer, writes a blog post that links to a post on astronomy, that’s a good sign. It means that the article on the other end of the link hasn’t raised Phil’s baloney-meter. That tends to make me trust the article more, because Phil would notice errors that I wouldn’t.

Does the site link to contrary views? In its heyday in the 1990s, one notable difference between the pro-evolution site talkorigins.org and anti-evolution sites was that talkorigins.org usually linked to the creationist sources they were discussing, and to creationist rebuttals of their articles. To me, this said “we’re going to make it easy for you to read the other side’s rebuttal, because we’re confident that the facts are on our side, and even if you read both sides, you’ll agree with us.”

Any others? Ideally, the sort of costly signal should be something hard for the writer to produce, and easy for the reader to verify, without requiring too much effort (because we want to dismiss bogus claims quickly) and without requiring special knowledge. And if the criterion fits on a bumper sticker, so much the better.

Me? On the Radio?

Yeah. The UMD Society of Inquiry has a radio show on WMUC (5 watts, broadcasting to the greater South Campus Commons Area. But it’s not owned by ClearChannel, which counts for something). One of the guys who was supposed to do the show today had to bail, so I got pulled in as an emergency backup replacement.

On the off chance that you’re interested, the show can be downloaded here (and the last 30 seconds here) until next Monday.

Maryland Gay Marriage Bill Fails

Well, fuckbunnies. The bill to allow gay marriage in Maryland passed the state Senate, got out of committee in the House, avoided getting stuck with several amendments (that would have sent it back to the Senate), and finally got to floor debate in the House, only to be sent back to committee.

The proponents of the bill figured they didn’t have enough votes to pass it. And AIUI sending the bill back to committee rather than allowing it to be voted on meant not forcing delegates to reveal how they would have voted. I’m just speculating here, but for all I know there might also be some procedural reason, like if a bill fails, it can’t be reintroduced for another two years; not having an actual vote might mean that it can be reintroduced sooner than that.

This is disappointing, but life goes on. I have no doubt that gay marriage will eventually become as normal as interracial marriage.

In the meantime, go home, knock back a couple of rum and cokes, and fantasize about the patriarchs at NOM gagging on a bag of cocks. You know that a lot of them will be doing the same.

Hachèlème bouguille

Way back when, when I was converting my tape collection to MP3, I ran across a song by legendary Genevan blues-rockers (don’t laugh) Le Beau lac de Bâle that I couldn’t recognize. It didn’t seem to correspond to any songs in the album track listings I could find. I tried googling the lyrics, but couldn’t find anything (yes, Virginia, there are things even Google can’t find).

Eventually, I stumbled upon this 45 RPM single, and learned that the mystery song was called “Hachèlème bouguille”.

You can listen to it here.

So as a favor to the next person to run into the same problem, here are the lyrics, in a form that Google can track down:

Vous vivez à sept dans un trois-pièces aux Palettes
J’attrape la migraine en y venant une fois par semaine

Ton frère Jean-Paul écoute toute la nuit Sex Pistols
Et ta soeur Yvette écoute du Wagner aux toilettes

Quitte cette maison de fous
Tu ferais mieux de venir avec nous
On est sympa comme tout
On t’offrira tout plein de Sugus et de cachous

Ton père est pervers, il ne joue qu’au strip poker
Il picole en caleçon devant la télévision

Ta mère tous les matins chante la messe en latin
Oui mais tous les soirs elle chante du rock dans sa baignoire

Quitte cette maison de fous…

Le petit Victor fait du ski dans l’corridor
Et la petite Aline, elle est en froc dans la cuisine

Et le grand Raoul qu’est dev’nu maboul à Kaboul
(Choubidoubi choubidoua)
Sur le balcon, il a une drôle de plantation
(Choubidoubi choubidoua)

Quitte cette maison de fous… (bis)

Quitte cette maison de fous
Et on t’offrira tout plein
Tout plein
Tout plein
De quoi?
De Sugus
De Sugus
De Sugus
Et de cachous

Okay, I should probably have posted this in French, shouldn’t I?

Creative Ignorance

The other day, I was in a discussion about whether computers can be creative. Personally, I thought the answer was a big “duh, yes”, if only because programs (often even my own) often do things that surprise me, but at least I managed to shift the conversation toward the question of “what is creativity? How will you recognize it when a computer achieves it?” And along the way, I noticed a couple of things about creativity.

For one thing, the perception of creativity can depend on the audience’s ignorance. Years ago, I wrote a custom email filter for my boss, because none of the commonly-used ones could easily do what he wanted (like filter on the number of people in the “To:” and “Cc:” lines). When I showed it to him, he thought it was the most amazing thing ever, that we should write a paper about it, and send it in to a research journal. I told him that this was too trivial, and that I couldn’t in good conscience call it groundbreaking or innovative, and that I’d be embarrassed to send it to a research journal.

In short, my boss thought my code was innovative because he knew far less than I did about the state of mail filters. And to this day, whenever I see a statue or painting or something and think, “Oh, that’s cleverly cool! I never would’ve thought of that”, I immediately have second thoughts along the lines of “Yes, but that’s because you don’t hang out with artists and go to galleries and such. The person who did this probably just took five or six ideas that were floating around the technisphere and tweaked them.”

A lot of the proposed definitions of “creativity” circled around the general idea of “using a tool in a new or unexpected way”. And it occurred to me that you don’t need intelligence to be creative in this way. If you don’t know what a tool is for, you won’t be burdened with preconceived ideas of how you ought to use it. In fact, that’s how natural selection works: it has no intelligence whatsoever, and doesn’t know that wings are “for” protecting eggs, and doesn’t punish those individuals that manage to use them for gliding or flying.

Of course, if you’re an adult human, then you’re intelligent (at least compared to natural selection or a bacterium), so this type of creativity is harder. But you can use first sight.

In Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky, Tiffany Aching is said to have “first sight and second thoughts”. First sight is the ability to see what’s actually in front of you, rather than what you think is there.

There’s an old story about a student who was asked on a test to measure the height of a building with a barometer that I’m sure you’re all familiar with. Because the problem specified the use of a barometer, clearly the instructor expected students to use the barometer for the thing that barometers are supposed to be used for, namely measure air pressure.

The student’s smartass answers seem creative (oh, come on, admit it: you thought it was cool, the first time you heard the story) is that he ignores the fact that barometers are for measuring air pressure, and sees its other properties: it has mass, so it can be swung like a pendulum; it has length, so it can be used to count off units of height; it has value, so it can be offered as a bribe.

Outside of the world of contrived puzzles, first sight can also be useful, because it lets you stop asking “what is this for?” and start asking “what can I do with this?”. That last question, in turn, breaks down into sub-questions like “what tools do I have?”, “what properties do they have?”, and “how does this property help me solve my problem?”

For instance, spreadsheets are nominally for tabulating data, aggregating sums and averages of interesting numbers, and like that. But people have noticed that hey, Excel does arithmetic, so why not use it as a calculator? I’ve also worked with people who noticed that hey, it lays things out in neat columns, so why not use it as a to-do list?

When technology advances, old tools sometimes become cheap enough to do simple tasks. Car phones have existed for a long time, but if you grew up in the 1960s, you probably decided that they were just fancy toys that rich people used to flaunt their wealth. But in the 1990s, they became cheap enough that anyone could have one. So if you were running a business in the 90s and were expecting people to use pay phones to stay in touch with the office while they were traveling, you were going to have your lunch eaten by the people who had looked at the field the way it was, not the way you imagined it, and realized that they could just give all their salespeople and field techs cell phones.

On a grander scale, the Internet was originally set up for government researchers to share data, and as a nuclear-war-resistant means of communication for the military. It certainly wan’t built to help you find friends from High School or coordinate popular uprisings in the Middle East. That part came from people looking at the thing for what it was, and ignoring &mdash: or often ignorant of — what it was supposed to be for.

What’s interesting about this, I think, is that you don’t need to be a genius to be creative. In fact, you don’t even need intelligence at all. A lot of creationists look at the complexity of biological systems and can think only in terms of a superior intellect putting the pieces together to achieve a goal.

But if I’m right, then it’s possible to be creative simply by being to stupid to know what’s impossible. Creativity can be what Dennett called a crane, rather than a skyhook.

Gay Marriage Passes MD Senate

In case you hadn’t heard, the Maryland Senate passed a bill allowing gay marriage. So yay! Go Maryland!

From here, it has to go to the House of Delegates, so it’s not settled yet. So if you’re in Maryland, write your delegates and tell them that you oppose special rights for heterosexuals.

If this passes, Maryland could become the marriage mecca for gay couples in Pennsylvania and West Virginia who are willing to go out of state to get married, but not as far as DC, as well as Virginians who’d rather not deal with traffic in the District.

The Great Atheist Rapture

So, remember the superstitious folks who think that Jesus will make his great comeback tour on May 21, 2011? Well, Ray Garton, during his recent interview on the Irreligiosophy podcast, had a simple but brilliant idea that I think deserves to be spread around:

If you have superstitious friends, family members, coworkers, etc. who believe in rapture twaddle; and if they know you’re an atheist, then on May 21, sneak out and leave a pile of clothes behind. Make them think you’ve been raptured.

The downside of this is that May 21, 2011 falls on a Saturday, so it won’t work with coworkers, unless you work Saturdays. But maybe you can come to dinner with your family, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, change into spare clothes that you’ve stashed under the sink, and sneak out the window. Or something. Use your imagination.

Arguably, me posting this might give the game away, but I’m not too worried about that: the people who’ll be fooled by this trick won’t read this. They probably recoil from any atheist site as if they’d been burned with pornographic acid or something.

(And speaking of the May 21sters, here’s a shout-out to the Countdown to Backpedaling.)

An Open Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury

(This was originally posted at Secular Perspectives.)

The Telegraph reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury wants Christians to argue their side more forcefully:

Clergy are to be urged to be more vocal in countering the arguments put forward by a more hard-line group of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have campaigned for a less tolerant attitude towards religion.

A report endorsed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warns that the Church faces a battle to prevent faith being seen as “a social problem” and says the next five years are set to be a period of “exceptional challenge”.

Dear Dr. Williams,

This seems as good a time as any to repeat what Christopher Hitchens wrote in the introduction to his anthology, The Portable Atheist:

A terrible thing has now happened to religion. Except in the places where it can still enforce itself by fear superimposed on ignorance, it has become one opinion among many. It is forced to compete in the free market of ideas and, even when it strives to retain the old advantage of inculcating its teachings into children (for reasons that are too obvious to need underlining), it has to stand up in open debate and submit to free inquiry.

I, for one, welcome better arguments from believers, and I suspect that many atheists and humanists do, too. But then, a lot of us argue ideas for fun and to get at the truth by knocking down bad ideas.

And the fact is that an awful lot of apologetics is of very low quality. You might be surprised at how often we’re offered Pascal’s wager, C.S. Lewis’s Liar, Lunatic, or Lord, arguments from ignorance, and even “you just have to have faith” come up. Evidently a lot of theists have no idea how comically weak these arguments are. If you could educate them, we’d appreciate it. Thank you.

Over the centuries, religion has erected a protective wall around itself: blasphemy laws, intimidation, social taboos against criticizing religion (often in the name of ecumenicalism), mean that religious ideas have been insulated from criticism for a long time. And as a result, many theists have very little experience defending their ideas against rational arguments. And now that atheists are speaking up, and things like free-speech laws prevent religions from silencing dissent, this fact is becoming more and more apparent.

But if I may, I’d like to offer some advice on arguing with atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, as well as lesser luminaries like PZ Myers and Matt Dillahunty, and even rank-and-file atheists like myself.

The key is to realize that our commitment is to the truth, not to any given set of ideas, tenets, or dogmas.

Philosophers and scientists have done a lot of work in figuring out how to figure out what’s true, and how to avoid coming to incorrect conclusions. It is easy to find lists of logical fallacies. You may want to educate your coreligionists on these fallacies and how to avoid them, because people who rely on fallacious arguments will be called on it.

What we’re really looking for is arguments for the existence of a god that don’t fall apart under scrutiny. If you have such an argument, please present it. If you don’t have one (yet), then it would be nice if you could at least say so.

Secondly, when asked for reasons to believe that there are any gods, theists often reply by pointing out the good done by their churches. But of course that is a non sequitur: it may in fact be useful for people to believe in gods, souls, or reincarnation, but that doesn’t mean that those things actually exist. Please tell your coreligionists to make sure they’re not arguing the wrong topic, because they will be called on it.

I realize that it’s easy to see the above as concern trolling. Actually, it’s cockiness. I’m so confident that spirited, rational argumentation will bring us closer to the truth (and remember, my commitment is to truth, not to atheism) that I can afford to give the game away, as it were.

So bring it on. And may the best ideas win.

(Thanks to Shelley for forwarding the Telegraph article.)

Secular Bible Study: The Song of Solomon

Since tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, today’s Secular Bible Study is about the Song of Solomon.

And you thought there wasn’t any erotica in the Bible.

Anyway, my notes are here (and also Org-Mode format).

Bourne Shell Introspection

So I was thinking about how to refactor our custom Linux and Solaris init scripts at work. The way FreeBSD does it is to have the scripts in /etc/rc.d define variables with the commands to execute, e.g.,

start_cmd='/usr/sbin/foobard'
stop_cmd='kill `cat /var/run/foobar.pid`'

run_rc_command "$1"

where $1 is “start”, “stop”, or whatever, and run_rc_command is a function loaded from an external file. It can check whether $stop_cmd is defined, and if not, take some default action.

This is great and all, but I was wondering whether it would be possible to check whether a given shell function exists. That way, a common file could implement a generic structure for starting and stopping daemons, and the daemon-specific file could just set the specifics by defining do_start and do_stop functions.

The way to do this in Perl is to iterate over the symbol table of the package you’re looking for, and seeing whether each entry is a function. The symbol table for Foo::Bar is %Foo::Bar::; for the main package, it’s %::. Thus:

while (my ($k, $v) = each %::)
{
	if (defined())
	{
		print "$k is a functionn";
	}
}

sub test_x() {}
sub test_y() {}
sub test_z() {}

But I didn’t know how to do it in the Bourne shell.

Enter type, which tells you exactly that:

#!/bin/sh

# List of all known commands
STD_CMDS="start stop restart status verify"
MORE_CMDS="graceful something_incredibly_daemon_specific"

do_start="This is a string, not a function"

do_restart() {
	echo "I ought to restart something"
}

do_graceful() {
	echo "I am so fucking graceful"
}

for cmd in ${STD_CMDS} ${MORE_CMDS}; do
	if type "do_$cmd" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
		echo "* do_$cmd is defined"
	else
		echo "- do_$cmd is not defined"
	fi
done

And yes, this works not just in bash, but in the traditional, bourne-just-once shell, on every platform that I care about.

So yay, it turns out that the Bourne shell has more introspection than
I thought.