My podcast with Radio Live

May 22, 2017 • 8:15 am

When I was in New Zealand I was unable to do a podcast with reader Graeme Hill for the podcast Radio Live, but I did it from my home in Chicago a few days ago. I was on my landline, so the sound quality on my end isn’t optimal. The interview is about 40 minutes long; click on the screenshot below (taken in February 2016) to go to the podcast. I like the photo as it brings back pleasant memories of Darwin Day last year, when I spoke to the British Humanists. My hair is a bit unkempt, but at least I have a tie.  Behind me you can see the well known anatomist and science presenter Alice Roberts, who was the moderator that night.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

May 22, 2017 • 7:30 am

Because it’s World Biodiversity Day, I thought I’d show a diversity of photographs, each from a different reader. Most of them, of course, will be birds! Readers’ notes are indented.

Oh, and keep those photos coming in, folks. I can never have too many.

First up is by Brianna Ernst, daughter of Darrell Ernst:

This is a portrait of a boat-tailed grackle (Quiscalus major). Very serious! Though the males are black, in good lighting you can see all sorts of shade variations from purples to blues and more, changing as the lighting angle changes. A clue that the color is a result of scattering, diffraction and refraction affects due to surface structure rather than pigments. The photo was taken within 25 miles of where we live and this was taken by my daughter Brianna with a Nikon D3200.

From Divy Figueroa, a starfish of unknown species, photographed in Parguera, Puerto Rico [JAC: This now appears to be a “cushion star,” Oreaster reticulatus; h/t Christopher Mah.]

From Don Bredes:

Thought you’d like to see an indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea) and an  American goldfinch (Spinus tristis) together; not sharp, alas, as it was 6:30 am so the light was low, but the colors are striking.

From Joe Dickinson:

This rather chubby California ground squirrel (Citellus beecheyi) was expertly working tourists visiting Morro Rock [California]:

From Stephen Barnard in Idaho, sent on Saturday:

Here’s yet another Wilson’s Snipe (Gallinago delicata) photo from this morning. He’s almost tame. His name is Willie.

From Mark Sturtevant, a mantid snapped in Michigan:

Late in the summer, one can fairly regularly find the European mantis (Mantis religiosa) out in the fields. This picture is of picture is a female, taken on the day that I released her after a couple days of being pampered and generally fussed over while in captivity. The same mantises were seen before in WEIT for some of the ‘Spot the mantis’ challenges.

Monday: Hili dialogue

May 22, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Monday, May 22, 2017. It’s National Vanilla Pudding Day, but they left out the vanilla wafers, an essential accompaniment. It’s also a UN holiday: World Biodiversity Day. I’ll try to find some diverse photos for the next post.

I’ll be heading to Washington D.C. tomorrow for an onstage chat with Richard Dawkins on Wednesday, so posting will be light.  If you’re there and buy one of my books (Richard’s books will be the main draw), meow like a cat and I’ll draw you one along with a signature.

On this day in 1804, the The Lewis and Clark Expedition got underway as the group left for the West from St. Charles, Missouri. And on May 22, 1849, Abraham Lincoln was granted a patent for an invention to lift boats; he was the only U.S. President to ever have a patent. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the invention, a model, and the tag. It was never used on real boats:

Abraham Lincoln’s patent is a patent for an invention to lift boats over shoals and obstructions in a river. It is the only United States patent ever registered to a President of the United States. Lincoln conceived the idea of inventing a mechanism that would lift a boat over shoals and obstructions when on two different occasions the boat on which he traveled got hung up on obstructions. Documentation of this patent was discovered in 1997.

This device was composed of large bellows attached to the sides of a boat that was expandable due to air chambers. His successful patent application led to his drafting and delivering two lectures on the subject of patents while he was President.

The tag:

On May 22, 1906, the Wright brothers were also granted a patent, this time for their airplane, called a “Flying-Machine”. In Auckland New Zealand on this day in 1987, the first Rugby World Cup began; the host nation of course won it. Finally, just two years ago on this day, The Republic of Ireland became the world’s first country to legalize gay marriage in a public referendum.

Notables born on this day include Richard Wagner (1813), Mary Cassatt (1844), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859), Hergé (1907), Laurence Olivier (1907), and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski (1942). Those who died on this day include Victor Hugo (1885), Lefty Grove (1975), geneticist and Nobel Laureate Alfred Hershey (1997), and Martin Gardner (2010).

Here are three paintings by Mary Cassatt, a rare woman Impressionist:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, everybody is having walkies, and you can see the shadow of the staff taking photos:

Hili: I like it.
Cyrus: What do you like?
Hili: Finally a normal communing of all animals.
In Polish:
Hili: To lubię.
Cyrus: Co lubisz?
Hili: Nareszcie jakieś normalne wszystkich zwierząt obcowanie.

Lagniappe: Lion hugs, sent by reader Barry

The Three Stooges speak Yiddish

May 21, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Wikipedia explains the Yiddish phrase “Hakn a tshaynik”  (you can pronounce it as “Hawk-en ah chainig”) like this:

. . . (literally “to knock a teakettle”; Yiddish: האַקן אַ טשײַניק), meaning to rattle on loudly and insistently, but without any meaning, is a widely used Yiddish idiomatic phrase. It is most often used in the negative imperative sense: Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik! (literally “Don’t knock a teakettle at me!”; Yiddish: !האַק מיר נישט קיין טשײַניק), in the sense of “Stop bothering me!”

The article adds this:

The phrase became familiar to many Americans without contact with Yiddish speakers by appearing in popular Three Stooges short films. In the 1936 film A Pain in the Pullman, when caught sneaking out of their rooms without paying rent, Moe tries to explain to the landlord by saying, “Well, we were just on our way to hock the truck so we could pay you,” to which Larry kicks in, “Hey, hock a chynick for me too, will ya?”, earning himself a swift kick in the shin. In 1938’s Mutts to You, Larry, disguised as a Chinese laundryman, pretending to speak Chinese, utters a stream of Yiddish doubletalk, ending with “Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik, and I don’t mean efsher (maybe)!”.

I sometimes use the negative imperative phrase, but here’s that bit from Mutt’s to You showing Curly saying it. Talk about cultural appropriation—we have a white guy pretending to be Chinese and speaking Yiddish! Is that kosher?

Here’s what Larry says, as given in the YouTube notes:

“Ikh bin ah China boychik fun Slobodka un Ikh bet dir ‘hak mir nit ah chaynik’ and I don’t mean efsher”. The phrase is Yiddish for “I am a Chinese kid from Slobodka and I beg you don’t hassle me and I don’t mean maybe.”

Moe then says, “He’s from China—East Side.” The Lower East Side was, of course, the area of Manhattan where, decades ago, an area where you’d hear Yiddish:

“Moe Howard”‘s real name was Moses Harry Horwitz, and “Larry Fine”‘s real name was Louis Feinberg. They were, of course, both Jewish. (So was Curly, who was Moe’s real-life brother and named Jerome Lester Horwitz.) They changed their names to make it in show business, but you can’t take take the Yiddish out of the boy.

It is surprising that they used the phrase in their comedy shorts.

Spy novel author advised by an editor not to create black characters because he is white

May 21, 2017 • 1:00 pm

This story  was reported in the BBC,  but verified by the Guardian and the Torygraph. It’s another example of so-called cultural appropriation, and an example that is risible. It involves Anthony Horowitz, an author of spy and mystery novels and a screenwriter who is well regarded, at least in some quarters, for he has an OBE. I hadn’t heard of him, but my reading in that genre stopped with Sherlock Holmes, which I loved. (Horowitz apparently wrote two Holmes books as well.)

The BBC:

Author Anthony Horowitz says he was “warned off” including a black character in his new book because it was “inappropriate” for a white writer.

The creator of the Alex Rider teenage spy novels says an editor told him it could be considered “patronising”.

Horowitz wanted a white and black protagonist in his new children’s books but says he is now reconsidering.

“I will have to think about whether this character can be black or white,” he told the Mail on Sunday.

“I have for a long, long time said that there aren’t enough books around for every ethnicity.”

Horowitz, who has written 10 novels featuring teenage spy Alex Rider, said there was a “chain of thought” in America that it was “inappropriate” for white writers to try to create black characters, something which he described as “dangerous territory”.

He said it was considered “artificial and possibly patronising” to do so because “it is actually not our experience”.

“Therefore I was warned off doing it. Which was, I thought, disturbing and upsetting.”

Horowitz, who has written a new James Bond book, went on: “Taking it to the extreme, all my characters will from now be 62-year-old white Jewish men living in London.”

And in the interest of honesty, the report adds this:

The author also revealed he had apologised to actor Idris Elba after saying he was “too street” to be the next James Bond in an interview in 2015.

He was criticised by fans who accused him of making a veiled racial remark.

Horowitz said the fallout from his remarks was “unpleasant because it went against everything I believe in”.

“The character I was being portrayed as was not the person I am,” he added. “I’m still deeply sorry. I’m still annoyed at myself, it was stupid.”

Horowitz said he apologised to Elba at a film premiere and the actor “could not have been more charming, more delightful, more humane”.

He revealed the experience changed him and he is now “more guarded, more careful and more discreet”.

Be that as it may, it’s simply ludicrous to prevent white authors from writing about black characters. Not only wouldn’t we have Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Thomas Wolfe’s wonderful and sad The Child by Tiger, but, in fact, omitting black characters from literature or plays written by whites would lead to complaints of marginalization and racism. You can’t win!

Grania also pointed this out:

I wonder what will happen to Ben Aaronovitch who is writing an entire series about a black police officer in London, and the local Jamaican immigrant culture there.

He’s as cishet white male as you can get and has spent most of his career writing science fiction.

Of course his wife is not white, and neither are their children, obviously.

Does this mean that nobody can “write down”? Can whites write about Hispanics, or Hispanics about African-Americans?  Can any man write about women? If not, why not? After all, men don’t have “the woman experience”? (And vice versa, but that’s supposedly “writing up”.)

The solution, of course, is to stop this nonsense. Let writers write what fiction they want, and let everyone and the market sort it out. But let us not have this chilling a priori censorship.

h/t: Michael

A humanities scholar rebuts criticisms of the “conceptual penis” paper

May 21, 2017 • 10:30 am

“At a time when superstitions, obscurantism and nationalist and religious fanaticism are spreading in many parts of the world – including the ‘developed’ West – it is irresponsible, to say the least, to treat with such casualness what has historically been the principal defense against these follies, namely a rational vision of the world… [F]or all those of us who identify with the political left, postmodernism has specific negative consequences. First of all, the extreme focus on language and the elitism linked to the use of a pretentious jargon contribute to enclosing intellectuals in sterile debates and to isolating them from social movements taking place outside their ivory tower… Second, the persistence of confused ideas and obscure discourses in some parts of the left tends to discredit the entire left; and the right does not pass up the opportunity to exploit this connection demagogically.”

That is a quote from the book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1999) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, written three years after Sokal’s famous “hoax paper” was published in the journal Social Text.  The quote shows the danger that postmodern scholarship in the humanities and “cultural studies” pose not only to science, but to the entire Progressive Left.

That quote appears in a new paper in  Areo Magazine by Helen Pluckrose: “Sokal affair 2.0: Penis envy: addressing its critics“. Pluckrose is identified as “a researcher in the humanities who focuses on late medieval/early modern religious writing for and about women. She is critical of postmodernism and cultural constructivism which she sees as currently dominating the humanities.” She certainly has the credibility, and the chops, to assess the “conceptual penis” paper published only two days ago by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (B&L).

As you probably know, B&L’s paper, accepted and published by the journal Cogent Social Sciences, was a Sokal-ian hoax: a mishmash of jargon from gender studies written to demonstrate the low academic standards of some areas of the humanities, and exposing the willingness of those infected with postmodernism to promote “scholarship” congenial to their ideology. I wrote about the B&L paper on this site, and won’t go into its substance (or rather “non-substance”).  Nor will I rebut the many Regressive Leftist critics of that paper, for that’s what Pluckrose ably does in her Areo piece. You can find those criticisms everywhere simply by Googling “Boghossian Lindsay hoax”, and there’s a fair amount of criticism  in the comments following my original post.

I’ll list the five criticisms of B&L listed and dismantled by Pluckrose, giving one quote from her paper (indented) and adding a few comments of my own at the end. The bullet points are taken directly from her article; do read it to see her rebuttals. I’ve left out summaries of her rebuttals because I want you to see them in the paper,

  • The hoax isn’t really a hoax because it makes a good argument. 

 

  • The hoax targeted a bad journal which does not represent gender studies. Here’s part of Pluckrose’s response:

In stark contradiction to the criticism above, many defenders of gender studies have claimed that Cogent Social Sciences is widely known to be a bad journal and more reputable ones would not have taken it seriously. The problem with that is that it is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), ProQuest Social Science Journals, the British Library, Cabell’s International and many more of the largest indices. It is not highlighted as a problem in the much-relied upon Beall’s list of predatory journals and was recommended to Lindsay and Boghossian by the NORMA journal. It is part of the highly-regarded Taylor & Francis Group which confirms that Cogent offers thorough scholarly peer review and has all the “traditional values and high standards associated with Taylor & Francis and Routledge at its core.”

Even more significantly (and as shown by the first criticism), the language and “argument” of the hoax piece is indistinguishable from sincere gender studies publications from a range of academic journals. The Twitter account New Real Peer Review, which is dedicated to highlighting ludicrous theses, spent much of the day demonstrating this.

Pluckrose then gives links from that Twitter site to real academic papers. I’ve highlighted some on my own site over the last year, including papers on the white supremacy instantiated by Halloween pumpkins, feminist glaciology, the racism of Pilates, and the “otherness” of introduced squirrels. Lest you think these are an unrepresentative sample of a large and solid scholarly literature, the “Real Peer Review” site had highlighted over 1000 ludicrous papers in only four months, and, about a year ago, offended scholars had that account briefly shut down after threatening to expose its author, who feared retaliation simply for calling attention to bizarre and shoddy publications. It’s now back up, and you should follow it.

More criticisms rebutted by Pluckrose:

  • The hoax is a one-off and proves nothing.

 

  • The hoax is just another attack on the humanities/ Social Science by science.

 

  • The hoax was transphobic and sexist.

I’ll add just a few remarks of my own. First, those who respond by saying that over a thousand articles, of which B&L’s is one, are all cherry picked from a body of substantive and meaningful scholarship, then assume the onus of demonstrating that culture and gender studies really have produced a substantive body of knowledge compared to the time and money invested in research and writing. The critics haven’t done any such thing; they’ve merely attacked B&L for cherry picking. There is ample evidence, documented for in Sokal and Bricmont’s book—and Gross and Levitt’s 1994 book Higher Superstition—that much research in this area is trivial, obscurantist, and serves only to advance the careers of academics. The “cherry picking” claim resembles that of theologians, who say that a few examples of “bad theology” aren’t sufficient to discredit a body of work whose “best examples” are ignored. Having read a reasonable amount of theology, I’ve found this argument specious, and suspect, based on what reading I’ve done in academic humanities, that the same speciousness is true for claims in some areas of academic humanities. Again, I emphasize that much of the humanities is worthwhile: a boon to our species. But the trendy sort infected by postmodernism is a rotten edifice.

Finally, I find it amusing that those who implicitly defend cultural and gender studies by attacking B&L’s paper are often the same people who attack evolutionary psychology as a worthless discipline, despite the fact that evo psych has produced considerable insights into human behavior—far more insights, I suspect, than have been produced by postmodernist humanities scholars.

h/t: Grania

Are there more American atheists than we thought?

May 21, 2017 • 9:15 am

Surveys of the proportion of Americans who are atheists show an incidence of between 3% and 11%, but of course those are often phone surveys, and people may be reluctant to divulge their nonbelief.  That probably means that there are more atheists than those who admit it. And that’s the conclusion of two psychologists from the University of Kentucky, Will M. Gervais and Maxine B. Najle, who have a new paper up on “psyarxiv” that used a questionnaire to answer the question (link and reference below; I’m not sure if the paper has yet been accepted anywhere).

Their conclusion came, which came from two surveys of 2000 American adults is this: “[A]theist prevalence exceeds 11% with greater than .99 probability and exceeds 20% with roughly .8 probability”. . . “our most credible indirect estimate is 26% (albeit with considerable estimate and method uncertainty).”

They used a survey method I was unaware of: the “unmatched count technique”. This method involves giving people a list of personality and behavior traits, one of which was either “I believe in God” or “I do not believe in God”, depending on whether the survey asked respondents to identify the traits that “are NOT true for me” (“I believe in God”) or “are true of me” (“I do not believe in God”).  There were two lists, one including the God statement and the other omitting it; these were given to two independent groups of people. A third and independent group was asked to self report whether they believed in God. Here’s an example of the “negative” survey from the paper:

Note that there are nine items in column 2 and ten in column 3, which adds the “I believe in God” item that you’re suppose to consider whether it’s among those statements not true of you.

The incidence of atheism can then be gauged by simply looking at the difference in the number of statements given at the bottom of the two columns. Bayesian analysis of the data can then give you an estimate of the proportion of atheists in the sample. They also did a “positive” survey with six versus seven items that are supposed to be true of you. (There’s a control for credibility based on a math question, but you can read about that in the paper.)

The results (authors’ wording, my emphasis); the numbers in brackets are the 95% confidence limits from the Bayesian analysis:

1).  Sample I’s unmatched count data revealed atheism rates much higher than existing self-reports suggest: the most credible indirect measure estimate from Sample I is that 32% [11%, 54%] of Americans do not believe in God, Figure 1.

2). Sample II included a conceptual replication effort of Sample I’s indirect estimate by comparing the baseline and critical conditions. Sample II also included an additional condition assessing validity of the indirect count technique by comparing the baseline and mathematical impossibility conditions.

Sample II yielded an indirect atheism rate estimate of 20% [6%, 35%], Figure 1. This atheism estimate is lower than that in Sample I. Speculatively, this difference may reflect (among other things) a difference in how participants respond to positive versus negative framing of the unmatched count tasks. That is, Sample II primarily differed from Sample I in that it included a positive affirmation of atheism (agreeing with the statement “I do not believe in God”) rather than a more passive denial of theism as in Sample I.

3).  Our aggregate analysis, pooling across samples, provided an indirect atheism prevalence rate of 26% [13%, 39%]. Unsurprisingly, this estimate is intermediate between both samples’ individual point estimates, but with a tighter range of  plausible values than either alone.

The estimate of self-reported atheism in the survey is 17% (error limits 14% and 20%), which is, as expected, lower than the indirect reports, but still higher than previous estimates. This may reflect either a sampling issue or the fact that Americans are more likely to say they’re atheists on paper than in a telephone survey.  But the upshot is that as many as one in four Americans may be atheists.

Now the paper is a fair one, and does highlight its problems; read it for yourself. It also shows that the estimate of atheism is, as most of us know, higher among men than among women, among Democrats and Independents than among Republicans, and increases with level of education. The authors’ conclusions:

Existing nationally representative polls indicate that atheist prevalence is relatively low in the United States, perhaps only 3% (Pew, 2015) to 11% (Gallup, 2015). Given the heavy stigmatization of atheism (Edgell et al., 2006), we hypothesized that many atheists might be reluctant to disclose their disbelief to pollsters. We therefore deployed two nationally representative samples in an attempt to indirectly measure atheist prevalence using the unmatched count technique (Raghavarao & Federer, 1979). These indirect measures suggest that roughly one in four (26%) American adults may be atheists—2.4 to 8.7 times as many as telephone polls (Gallup, 2015; Pew, 2015) suggest. This implies the existence of potentially more than 80 million American atheists. The disparity between self-report and indirectly measured atheism rates underscores the potent stigma faced by atheists (Edgell et al., 2006; Gervais, 2013), as even in an anonymous online survey, about a third of American atheists may be effectively “closeted,” even in anonymous telephone polls.

The lesson for us: Atheists, while still heavily stigmatized in America, are increasing in number. Most will not admit it for obvious reasons. But the more of us willing to declare our nonbelief, the more likely it is that those in the “closet” will come out. So declare your atheism—loudly and proudly.

__________

Gervais, Will M, and Maxine B Najle. 2017. “How Many Atheists Are There?”. PsyArXiv. March 3.