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Changesurfer Radio interviews Sheril Kirschenbaum
A good break down on the problems of the current “value added” model on education. Even if you believe education should be a market, there is no reason to believe that an education market functions like a retail product market where this value added ideology was power.
So I often reference TED conference speaker videos here. I was recently listening and watching several old conferences and stumbled across this particular TED talk:
I thought the Aquatic Ape was pretty completely debunked, but hearing that Dan Dennet supported the theory, I thought maybe I was going to have to look into it more seriously. So within a few days, I heard Reality Check podcast COVER this particular talk. Then it directed me to this site.
Now, I didn’t think TED would allow the science journalist to do a strawman argument and quote others out of context, but apparently, they did. So, even when the authority or venue is generally trust-worthy, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look deeper.
Steve Gibson publishes an interesting non-theistic sermon.
Here’s the a great episode of Reasonable Doubts about lying for Jesus in public policy.
You the the book on the Family has been out for over year, but its FINALLY getting attention. NPR did a story.
Ben Goldacre has a great post on the relationship between systemic review and myth making.
We’ll start with something funny: PZ Myers riding a dinosaur at the Creation Museum.
Neurophilosophy has some interesting thing to say on corvids.
Mike Trender says “What’s the Harm?” which is a run-down of Tim Farlay’s What’s the Harm Project.
Are Patients in Part to Blame When Doctors Miss the Diagnosis? Apparently, a combination of both.
Teacher Beat on Peer-Assistance and -Review: The Toledo Numbers controversary.
Everybody’s skeptical of something, and everyone I have ever met has accepted something on less than rational grounds. There are all sorts mental constructions that can cause on to forget preconceived notions generally blind use to the facts. Most skeptics focus on the obvious woo-woo topics or those cryptid or supernatural things that are, at best, lacking evidence and, at worse, denying evidence.
Yet there is other types of nonsense: mythologies, ideologies, teleologies, and other patterns of the mind that can be wrapped in the justifications and psuedo-scientific logic. Mike Treder at IEET discusses how they can overlap:
So, we have birtherism, creationism, singularitarianism, and climate science denialism. In each case, arguments are marshaled that seem to resemble scientific or legal reasoning but that end up as speculative assertions intended to support fanciful, ideological, or faith-based positions. No doubt some who subscribe to each of those schools of thought would object to being lumped in with the others; they’d loudly proclaim that while the other beliefs may be misguided, theirs is not. I’ve placed them together deliberately, though, because I think they reveal a pattern: a dangerous, insidious compartmentalization of rationality.
Standing up in the court of public opinion armed with fancy-looking charts and with quotes from “authorities,” the poseur assumes the role of a sophisticated deliberator, but the outside image is only a shell. Under the surface, deeper non-rational impulses drive them.
What is interesting is that Trender has to put a category of fellow transhumanists in to list. I would add objectivists, and some of the technocrats who I like. Anything that puts intuition on the same grounds as deductive knowledge WITHOUT drawing a clear line between the two can lead to having your ideology trump your reality.
I think Pinker is dramatically underplaying the scale of 20th violence, but he makes a great case that the rate of violence and the kind of violence has declined greatly even in recent history. However, I find these sorts of ideas to be dangerously teleological–they assume that because things ARE happening that they will CONTINUE to happen that way. I don’t think that such assumptions always bare out. Still, its good because most people talk about scale of violence and miss that the rate of violence has decreased greatly. Pinker has basically inverted the focus.
David Fraser commenting on Pinker’s argument on TED forums says,
In addition much of the poverty and “non-violent” death in the lake regions of East Africa among refugees is a by-product of the violence of armed militias as well as state forces. CAR is about to collapse into a failed state due to it. The death toll is not limited to those directly shot or blown up. One has to only walk among the displaced and the refugees to see that only some poverty is simply “aggression.” Southern Sudan, Darfur and other theaters are littered with civilian death as a by-product. One thinks also of the poverty of Zimbabwe and the tyranny that is inflicting death on its own population.
The Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research released a report on December 15, 2008. This year there are 9 wars and nearly 130 violent conflicts ranging from low intensity to high intensity. The single most powerful cause of these conflicts is ideological change.
It also seems like violence changes it form into less obvious types of conflict over time.
My first post for the Southern Skeptical Society’s blog is up. It talks about the what I feel is the ACLU mistaken tactic on “inclusive” movements as ways to drive secularization instead of restrictions. I also discuss Ed Buckner’s invocation at Cobb county.
Much more scary than Night of the Lepus , Religion Dispatches tells us of the return of the Promise Keepers, who are now seeking women and “jews” into their (zombie) horde of “muscular” Christianity.
Why are the Promise Keeper’s scary, other than being another annoying post-1970’s evangelical gimmick? Religion Dispatches get into it:
“Have you ever wondered why there is such hatred and violence against women?” Hoyt asked. “One out of every three women experience verbal or sexual abuse from those who profess to love them,” she declared, and then chided the Church for its complicity in women’s oppression. She denounced the fiction that women are inferior, and called this “a time to honor each other.” Hoyt’s stirring ethical appeal included the most blatant expression of the rally’s ideological subtext – Dominion theology.
In a promo video distributed in advance of the rally, Hoyt called the PK re-launch a “strategic event.” “The relationship between male and female must be fully restored for the Church to fulfill its destiny and exercise its heavenly authority in the world,” Hoyt said, in terms that reflect her understanding of spiritual warfare. To the crowd at Folsom Field on Friday night, she thundered, “Let them rule!” (Leaving me to wonder, of course, who is them?)
The Key word is: Dominion theology. That post-millenialist ideology that equates Christianity with rule of law and the literalization of kingdom of Christ. Pre-millenialist may get a lot of attention with their rapture death-worship, but Dominionists want to actually run things. It’s the ideology behind groups like the The Family and the Christian Reconstructionist movement.
I knew poor women who tithed ten percent “religiously.” When I worked at an insurance company several women, who I knew made less than 30k a year, would set aside large portions of their income for tithing. One of the things about Macon, where I live, is there are a unusually large number of churches even for the South. There is almost no where in town where I can go in which I don’t pass at least four churches. Some of which take up city blocks and have business holdings.
Tonight, I was listening to DJ Grothe interview Peter Singer about convincing people to give 1% to 5% of their income to poverty and medical related charity. Now, I don’t buy all of Singer’s arguments, but he really does have a point here. So as I was listening and driving, I passed THREE churches that were larger than city blocks. If I were a Christian, which I am not, this would bother me and I’d give a good portion of my tithe to Oxfam or Kiva instead. Indeed, as a secular person, I think we should probably adopt something akin to “tithing.”
