Author Archive for The Barefoot BumPage 2 of 17

Economics in the Crisis

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on March 6, 2012
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Paul Krugman on Economics in the Crisis:
To say the obvious: we’re now in the fourth year of a truly nightmarish economic crisis. I like to think that I was more prepared than most for the possibility that such a thing might happen; developments in Asia in the late 1990s badly shook my faith in the widely accepted proposition that events like those of the 1930s could never happen again. But even pessimists like me, even those who realized that the age of bank runs and liquidity traps was not yet over, failed to realize how bad a crisis was waiting to happen – and how grossly inadequate the policy response would be when it did happen.

And the inadequacy of policy is something that should bother economists greatly – indeed, it should make them ashamed of their profession, which is certainly how I feel. For times of crisis are when economists are most needed. If they cannot get their advice accepted in the clinch – or, worse yet, if they have no useful advice to offer – the whole enterprise of economic scholarship has failed in its most essential duty.

And that is, of course, what has just happened.

6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on March 6, 2012
.
6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying:
"Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I'm Hardly Rich."
"Hey, I Worked Hard to Get What I Have!"
"If I Can Do It, So Can You!"
"You're Just Jealous Because I Made It and You Didn't!"
"You Shouldn't Be Punishing the Very People Who Make This Country Work!"
"Stop Asking for Handouts! I Never Got Help from Anybody!"

The Stupid! It Burns! (honest edition)

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on March 4, 2012
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the stupid! it burns! Yes, atheists do sometimes make it to TSIB.

Congratulations, Atheists! I'm Ashamed To Be Counted Among You!:
I am so incredibly ashamed and infuriated by some of our most respected leaders: ashamed of their laziness; ashamed of their cowardice; ashamed of their closed-mindedness; ashamed of their inability and unwillingness to reason.

I am disappointed in my fellow community members: that we have the cojones to refer to theists as "sheeple" while, apparently, following along our own leaders equally blindly.

Why? Because one man suggested that Atheism and secularism has the potential to succeed to the same degree that religion has. How terrible of him! How dare he not conform! [emphasis omitted]

I have to admit, I did not complete the Honest Atheist's post: the Geocities use of formatting, colors, fonts, underlining, etc. started to make my eyes bleed. But apparently, this "honest atheist" appears to be all butthurt that a lot of atheists don't share his own admiration for de Botton's book; anyone who didn't like it, he seems to think, is obviously a deluded fool and couldn't possibly have read the book.

If you're ashamed to be one of us, HA, don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

Infanticide and authority

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on March 4, 2012
.
On February 23, 2012, the Journal of Medical Ethics published an article, titled "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?" by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva (publication information / PDF of full article):
Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Julian Savulescu, editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics writes in defense of his decision to publish the article. He notes (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the article is controversial and has generated considerable negative response. Savulescu defends his decision to publish the article on the grounds that the ethical evaluation of infanticide is a continuing theme in both medical ethics and ethical philosophy in general. According to Savulescu, the published article is novel in its "consideration of maternal and family interests" and because it "draws attention to the fact that infanticide is practised in the Netherlands."

Savulescu explicitly notes that his decision to publish does not rest on on his agreement with Giubilini and Minerva's argument. "The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics," Savulescu asserts, "is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view." He continues, "The Journal does not specifically support substantive moral views, ideologies, theories, dogmas or moral outlooks, over others. It supports sound rational argument." He assures us that the Journal would (if they met appropriate editorial standards) publish opposing arguments, including those that employed the moral equivalence of fetuses and infants asserted by Giubilini and Minerva to argue instead against the legality of abortion.

I'm not particularly impressed by the article. One key moral component of actual abortion, especially first-trimester abortion, is that there is a true conflict of rights between the pregnant woman and the fetus. Simply asserting that a fetus and an infant share the morally significant property of non-sapience cannot make abortion and infanticide morally equivalent. It does not matter how many morally relevant similarities two situations share; if they have any morally relevant differences, the two situations cannot be equivalent, and the authors' conclusion that "‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is," is facially unsound.

The argument for abortion does not rest on the premise that the instantiated potential (to coin a phrase) for humanity is morally irrelevant. The argument is, rather, that this potential human being substantially infringes on the rights of a fully actualized human being. The underlying doctrine is not that potentiality is irrelevant; the doctrine is that when the potential comes into substantive conflict with the actual, the actual takes precedence.

Indeed, the instantiated potential by itself is generally considered morally relevant. We conceive, for example, that should a pregnant woman choose to carry her fetus to term, she has obligations to act in the best interests of that potential future person; it is a moral offense, for example, for a pregnant woman who chooses to carry a fetus to term to smoke, drink alcohol, or take any action that she can reasonably expect to substantively harm the future person the fetus will become. Furthermore, a pregnant woman who chooses to carry the fetus to term has a moral claim on the rest of society to help her see to the well-being of the future person, such as prenatal medical care and obstetrics. The potential humanity of the fetus is not morally irrelevant; abortion rests only on the doctrine that the rights of the actual person take precedence over the rights of the potential person.

The conflict of the rights of an individual actual person no longer obtains after birth. There may be additional considerations, which deserve careful, rational deliberation, but when any morally relevant factor substantively changes, we cannot reasonably assert equivalence.

This analysis is fairly standard ethical philosophy. Even though I think their argument is unsound and their conclusion incorrect, I'm not in any way disturbed or "offended" that Giubilini and Minerva have constructed or published their argument. What is more interesting, however, is the Christian reaction to this article.

Religious ethics is in a curious dilemma. If there is a compelling rational argument for or against some proposed ethical principle, then by definition that argument is by itself a reason to hold or abjure the principle. We need not rely on claims of supernatural pronouncements of an invisible deity. On the other hand, these claims of supernatural pronouncements are required only when all rational arguments fail.

Emotional disgust is a morally relevant criterion. Disgust is not the only criterion, of course, and that a majority, even a near-consensus, finds some practice disgusting or abhorrent does not outweigh other criteria, but ceteris paribus, that some, many, or most people find some activity abhorrent by itself justifies ethical and legal treatment different from some other similar activity that is not considered abhorrent. One obvious example is cannibalism. Although we do not usually construe dead human bodies as having the same kinds of rights as actual, living persons, almost everyone finds cannibalism intolerably disgusting. This disgust is, by itself, sufficient rational justification for prohibiting the routine consumption, or sale for consumption, of human flesh. It is only when the moral force of this disgust creates a substantive conflict with the rights of actual, living people — usually the right to continue to live in extreme circumstances — that we have even a moral dilemma.

This case is, I think, similar. Even if we do not happen to conceive that infants — by virtue of their non-sapience — do not have personal rights, that we find their killing disgusting or abhorrent is, in the absence of any substantive conflict with the rights of other, sapient human beings, sufficient rational justification for prohibiting infanticide. That I as an individual do not want to kill an infant is, absent other ethical conflicts, sufficient justification for me not killing it; in just the same sense, that we as a society do not want to kill infants is, absent other ethical conflicts, sufficient justification for prohibiting the activity.

The key proviso, of course, is "absent other ethical conflicts." Every action, even the seemingly innocuous, entails some sort of ethical conflict. The business of ethical deliberation is discerning, weighing and arguing those conflicts. The point, however, is that desire by itself is one legitimate ethical consideration; indeed on a subjectivist meta-ethical level, all ethical conflicts are eventually about establishing hierarchies of desire and preference.

If preference is a legitimate moral criterion, why not simply argue directly on the merits? Infanticide is emotionally abhorrent, and unlike abortion, there are no substantive ethical conflicts that might plausibly outweigh avoiding infanticide, the rational case for making it illegal is open-and-shut. On the other hand, if abhorrence is morally irrelevant, it's not a criticism against proponents of infanticide that they countenance an abhorrent activity.

Thus religious critics of secular morality are in a bind. They have to appeal to emotion and simultaneously hold that emotion is completely morally irrelevant. Both horns of the dilemma are fatal to the religious position. If emotion is morally relevant, then they have a rational case; they don't have to appeal to religion to establish morality. If emotion is not morally relevant, then the emotional reaction to infanticide is irrelevant.

The dilemma is perhaps easier to see when we consider purely arbitrary moral beliefs. To some Muslims and Jews, eating pork is forbidden. But to many non-Muslisms/Jews, people such as myself, there's nothing at all abhorrent or disgusting about eating pork. The emotion in this case is, in a sense, "morally irrelevant" because the negative emotion is completely absent. A religious person must assert in this case that we need belief in God; otherwise, there's no good reason to refuse to eat pork. And the non-believer's obvious response is to forego the religious belief rather than pork. When emotion, by its absence, truly is irrelevant, the vacuity of religious morality is readily apparent.

When stated so baldly, the religious argument for morality fails so easily that the religious argument has to substantively complicate their discourse to obfuscate the central, inescapable dilemma. We see an example of this obfuscation in "Now the Atheists want to kill babies," which comments on Deacon Nick's article "Oxford University director attempts to justify abhorrent promotion of killing newborns", a criticism of Giubilini and Minerva's article and Savulescu's argument for publishing it.

The obfuscation, to the point of intellectual dishonesty, begins with the title of the article. First, in publishing the article as well as defending his decision to publish it, Savulescu is clearly acting in his capacity as the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, not in his capacity as director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. Second, Savulescu is explicit: his decision to publish the article does not imply he endorses the position. He declares that he published the article because of its "novel contribution" and to support "sound rational argument" and "freedom of ethical expression." Savulescu is attempting to justify rational discourse, not the promotion of anything. Deacon Nick admits as much: in the lede, he changes the wording of the title to, "Savulescu... has attempted to justify his publication of Giubilin [sic] and Minerva’s article. [emphasis added]" And later in the article, Deacon Nick admits that Savulescu, as editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, "does not specifically support substantive moral views."

I am not the only reader to be confused by the article; in the "Now the Atheists want to kill babies," which led me to Deacon Nick's article, the anonymous writer calls Savulescu a "pro-baby killing advocate." The author of "Now the Atheists" makes a rather obvious hasty generalization: an argument not even made but published by one person who happens to be an atheist cannot be reasonably attributed to "the Atheists" in the general plural.

Deacon Nick also misrepresents infanticide in the Netherlands and Savulescu's mention of it. Deacon Nick says, "Savulescu... has attempted to justify his publication [of the paper] by revealing the little known fact that it is already legal in Holland. But Deacon Nick actually quotes Savulescu, who says he published the paper because the authors revealed that infanticide is practiced in the Netherlands. (Deacon Nick does not cite any primary sources that asserts the practice is legal in the Netherlands.) Deacon Nick also asserts that "the Groningen Protocol allows a physician to deliver a lethal injection to a newborn who suffers from a disability, at the request of the child’s parents." But this is an egregious error. According to Giubilini and Minerva*, "The Groningen Protocol (2002) allows [physicians?] to actively terminate the life of ‘infants with a hopeless prognosis who experience what parents and medical experts deem to be unbearable suffering’."

*citing Verhagen and Sauer (2005), "The groningen protocol—euthanasia in severely ill newborns," in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Indeed, Deacon Nick seems entirely unconcerned about evaluating Giubilini and Minerva's position; Deacon Nick complains instead that the topic is even under discussion. "Julian Savulescu publicly admits he’s not disturbed by the argument that parents should be allowed to kill their newborn babies for social, psychological, or economic reasons because their babies are non-persons." But rational people in general, and especially medical ethicists, cannot allow themselves to be disturbed by mere arguments. Deliberation on any topic, and most especially ethical topics, is a social process. All the arguments must be made, and they must be published, and the whole point of an academic journal is to establish a neutral venue to publish all sides of an issue. If an argument is correct, it should of course be published; if it is incorrect, it must be published to be rebutted. This is an uncontroversial position since John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.

The critics of Giubilini and Minerva as well as Savulescu not only oppose the underlying argument; they are also incensed that an ethical principle is even being rationally considered in a social context. But why? If rational argument were not in their favor, then their position would simply be incorrect. But rational argument (as noted above) appears to actually be in their favor, so why not just rely on the argument itself? When someone does not make an obvious response in what appears to be his or her own interest, we are justified in looking for hidden motives.

Obviously, I can only speculate as to hidden motives. Rational discourse fundamentally undermines authority, social, cultural, and religious. It is a priori illegitimate to even question authority; an authority that must rationally justify its pronouncements is not authority at all. But in our democratic age, support for authority qua authority cannot be made openly. Instead, challenges to authority must be delegitimatized by indirect means. But to delegitimatize a challenge it is necessary that the actual points made by the challenge not be addressed, even if mistaken, invalid, or unsound. To address the substance of a challenge is to legitimatize it, and fundamentally undermine the notion of authority itself. Thus, religious advocates must take action not to further our rational understanding of ethics, but to undermine rational examination to maintain social, cultural, and religious privilege and authority.

Trust and security

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on March 3, 2012
.
Liars and Outliers: The Big Idea:
My big idea is a big question. Every cooperative system contains parasites. How do we ensure that society's parasites don't destroy society's systems?

It's all about trust, really. Not the intimate trust we have in our close friends and relatives, but the more impersonal trust we have in the various people and systems we interact with in society. ... [But] systems contain parasites. Most people are naturally trustworthy, but some are not. ...

My central metaphor is the Prisoner's Dilemma, which nicely exposes the tension between group interest and self-interest. And the dilemma even gives us a terminology to use: cooperators act in the group interest, and defectors act in their own selfish interest, to the detriment of the group. Too many defectors, and everyone suffers -- often catastrophically. ...

Also -- and this is the final kicker -- not all defectors are bad. If you think about the notions of cooperating and defecting, they're defined in terms of the societal norm. Cooperators are people who follow the formal or informal rules of society. Defectors are people who, for whatever reason, break the rules. That definition says nothing about the absolute morality of the society or its rules. When society is in the wrong, it's defectors who are in the vanguard for change. So it was defectors who helped escaped slaves in the antebellum American South. It's defectors who are agitating to overthrow repressive regimes in the Middle East. And it's defectors who are fueling the Occupy Wall Street movement. Without defectors, society stagnates.

We simultaneously need more societal pressure to deal with the effects of technology, and less societal pressure to ensure an open, free, and evolving society. This is our big challenge for the coming decade.

Stupidity and arrogance

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on March 2, 2012
.
In response to my post, The Stupid! It Burns! (fatwa edition), an anonymous commenter writes (reproduced in full, without emendation):
First, many of the atheists I encounter are *not* atheists - they are merely anti-christians, which is at best like having training wheels for atheism.

But this should be offensive to any atheist who has actually considered their opinion and approach beyond its "I just wanna stick it to the man" mentality. If you want to hate on Xtians then go ahead but don't act like its anything beyond a reaction to the populist mentality.

Are there "real" atheists ? Maybe a better way to ask this question is "are there people who have carefully considered their position as an atheist and what it actually means after having experienced the challenges that life has to deal out ?" But most atheists I encounter have yet to experience a fraction of a fraction of what life has to deal out. Its easy to be an "atheist" if you are living in your parents basement hitting the bong and watching Dawkins videos on youtube in between tokes.

So this book comes out and the "atheists" are all up in arms since it seeks to find some degree of commonality between opposing factions. The irony is that atheists are equal in their capacity to bore to any TV evangelist or jihadist. These opposing groups have more in common than not - yet they get all emo when a guy advocates that atheists could learn something from religion. Its just two sides of the same coin.

If you can define atheism as more than just anti-christian then you have a shot at getting some respect.
A stunning display of stupidity and arrogance. Where to begin? At the beginning, I suppose.

First, many of the atheists I encounter...
Why would my readers and I find any interest at all in the supposed atheists some anonymous commenter claims to have encountered? There are at least two forms of bias operating here: selection bias and confirmation bias. No one escapes innate bias, which is why responsible scientists and scholars show the original data, so that their attempts to counter their own innate bias can be independently evaluated. The commenter does not give us any clue as to the circumstances or conditions he or she encounters atheists, and gives us no clue as to what they themselves actually say, so we can determine whether his evaluation is accurate. The commenter is merely attempting (ineptly) to dress up his personal opinion in the clothing of actual investigation and deliberation.

Has the commenter read The God Delusion, Why I Am Not a Christian, or the works of Robert Green Ingersoll? Does he or she follow Planet Atheism, Richard Dawkins.net, Pharyngula, Why Evolution is True, indeed any of considerable freely available published opinions of a host of atheists? If he or she has read it and it conforms to his or her opinion of the atheists he or she has encountered, then better to criticize the published literature directly, with citations, quotations and accurate paraphrasing. If he or she has read it, and it does not conform to his or her opinion of the atheists he or she has encountered, then better to correct those atheists; why tell me? And, of course, if he or she has not read the published atheist literature, then the commenter is hypocritically arguing from a position of nearly complete ignorance, hardly a position from which to criticize the intellectual shallowness of others.

Many of the atheists I encounter are *not* atheists...
The commenter does not explicitly state his or her own position, but the text suggests that he or she is not an atheist, in which case the pronouncement of who is or is not an atheist is entirely inappropriate.

[Many so-called atheists] are merely anti-christians, which is at best like having training wheels for atheism. If you want to hate on Xtians then go ahead but don't act like its anything beyond a reaction to the populist mentality.
First of all, what's wrong with being anti-Christian? Too many people act like just the idea that Christianity might be bad is so obviously irrational that the actual arguments do not even deserve consideration.

Why should anti-Christianity be "training wheels for atheism"? I'm not at all confident that I understand the commenter's meaning here, but he or she seems to suggest that once people become competent (?) atheists, they will abandon anti-Christianity. But why would that be so? It seems to me that if they abandon or lack an innate attachment to their own particular religion, as people learn more about the philosophy and practice of religion, they become more hostile and contemptuous towards it. If the commenter wishes to argue otherwise, he or she might want to do more than merely assert opinion as fact and actually make the argument.

So this book comes out and the "atheists" are all up in arms since it seeks to find some degree of commonality between opposing factions.
Presumably, our commenter refers here to Alain de Botton's book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. It's unclear if the commenter uses "atheists" to refer to the undefined subset of atheists he or she has happened to meet and whose actual positions and comments he or she leaves entirely undefined. Again, if the commenter has a problem with their reaction, why talk to me? Why not talk to them directly?

Perhaps, on the other hand, the commenter refers to atheists in general. Perhaps he or she is entirely accurate, perhaps atheists in general (not just the ones he or she happened to have encountered) really are up in arms just because de Botton seeks to find some degree of commonality. Instead of just pulling an opinion out of his or her ass, the commenter would have a much stronger argument by citing and quoting actual published reactions to Religion for Atheists.

Are there "real" atheists ? Maybe a better way to ask this question is "are there people who have carefully considered their position as an atheist and what it actually means after having experienced the challenges that life has to deal out ?" But most atheists I encounter have yet to experience a fraction of a fraction of what life has to deal out.
This is just stupid. An atheist is just someone who doesn't believe in any god or gods. There are atheists at all stages of maturity and development. One can ask the same of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.: "Are there people who have carefully considered their position" as a Christian, Muslim, etc. "and what it actually means after having experienced the challenges that life has to deal out?" I would imagine that most Christians "have yet to experience a fraction of a fraction of what life has to deal out."

In one sense, the commenter is kind of correct; if religion or the lack thereof was a topic discussed only at the highest levels of philosophical, social, and learned consideration, then it would be disreputable for any layperson to confidently hold a definite position contrary to either the predominant opinion or substantial controversy of the experts. But of course religion and atheism are not like that. Religion claims substantial social privilege. This privilege is enforced, and in some cultures it is enforced by the state using the threat of death. It is religion, not atheism, that depends so strongly not on mature deliberation but rather on the indoctrination of children.

And, of course, if the commenter were to take one step out of his insulated cocoon, he would find that many atheists have given matters of religion mature, deliberate consideration. We will find atheists — who publish their opinions freely — among credentialed, academic philosophers, tenured scientists, and learned literary critics, as well as ordinary people such as myself of every age, from every profession and occupation.

Sure, there are atheists who, as the commenter suggests, do nothing but live in their parents' basements and do nothing but hit the bong and watch Dawkins videos on YouTube, but what of it? There's no membership committee for atheism: if you don't believe there's any god, you may legitimately adopt the label of atheist. If you're a stoner ne'er-do-well, at least you're a stoner ne'er-do-well with one fewer stupid idea. I could insult Christians in return (a pretty easy target), but in my own maturity, I find the exercise of trading insults to be tedious and unproductive.

If you can define atheism as more than just anti-christian then you have a shot at getting some respect.
Well, atheism is the lack of belief that there is any god. But that's not the point.

The point is that respect, in the sense of approval and admiration, is mutual. It is arrogant, presumptuous, disrespectful, and condescending to treat respect as something that can be handed down from on high. One does not earn respect from another; people develop a relationship of mutual respect. I do not want any "respect" that is handed down from any authority, legitimate or self-appointed. And I certainly do not want the respect of an obnoxious, fatuous, opinionated, self-aggrandizing, anonymous commenter who seems blithely unaware of the most basic standards of intellectual decency.

This comment (as well as Appleyard's moronic essay criticized in my original post) is not just isolated: it represents a substantial theme of not just informal but published discourse "critical" of the New Atheists. It is known (supposedly) that criticism of religion is inherently wrong; it therefore follows that the New Atheists are necessarily strident, shrill, superficial, immature, misguided, fanatical, ideological etc. just because they dare to criticize religion. The actual quality of the New Atheist arguments is irrelevant: the topic itself is (supposedly) off the table; just bringing it up is illegitimate and disreputable.

Of course, that's complete bullshit.

The Stupid! It Burns! (fatwa edition)

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on March 1, 2012
.
the stupid! it burns! Against the Neo-Atheists:
This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head. The temple idea in particular made them reach for their best books of curses.

Oh my! A fatwa you say? I'm waiting with worms on my tongue* for the hideous, violent pronouncements of doom from the New Atheists. Happily, Appleyard gives us an example:

*Bated breath

“I am rolling my eyes so hard that it hurts,” wrote the American biologist and neo-atheist blogger P Z Myers. “You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy.”

The horror! The violence! Rolling one's eyes is so clearly outside the bounds of civilized speech that Myers should be ashamed of himself.

Appleyard helpfully gives us a definition of neo-atheism:
By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
(This first part contains two parts, but I'm not here to critique Appleyard's math.) He's close enough for rock 'n' roll on this point, so let's push on. The second part is
Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.
And the stupid meter begins to move into the red. Appleyard does not cite or quote anyone who says that atheism and secularism are identical, or that secularism entails that religious views cannot be "taken into account". (Secularism, of course, entails only that the actions of government should be neutral with regard to religion; per the First Amendment, Congress (and the state legislatures, per the Fourteenth Amendment) cannot prohibit the free exercise of religion nor establish a religion.)

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.
And the stupid meter explodes.

As usual, there's a lot more stupid in the article. Some tidbits...

Francis Crick and James Watson conceded that one of their main motivations in unravelling the molecular structure of DNA was to undermine religion.
Uh, yeah. The Nobel Prize, the thrill of discovery... piffle. It's all about undermining religion! And even if they were motivated by opposition to religion, so what? DNA really is how genetics work.

[PZ] Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading [Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's book, What Darwin Got Wrong] but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.
This is why responsible scholars cite and quote. In his article, "Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini get everything wrong," (which took me twelve seconds to find) Myers says, "I haven't read their book, What Darwin Got Wrong, and I don't plan to; they've published a brief summary in New Scientist . . . and that was enough." Apparently it's "intellectual tyranny" to accurately identify the authors' work and criticize what you've accurately identified.

Fundamentally, Appleyard assumes as fact that it is bizarre and pointless to use science to explain religion and "the human experience." In addition to the neo-atheists, I suppose Appleyard will be going after the dogmatic, ideological, and intolerant sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, etc. leaving only the literary critics... such as Christopher Hitchens.

The Stupid! It Burns! (plethora of stupidity edition)

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 29, 2012
.
the stupid! it burns! Borrowing From Atheists - Part1 - Naturalism:
In fact, it was Richard Dawkins who said he would not be an atheist were it not for the theory of evolution.
Christians seem all too often not bothered by the whole "making up facts" thing. Although Dawkins said precisely the opposite (in the introduction to The God Delusion), evolution is pretty damn nifty.
Naturalism has invaded the planet like a disease and made men into wimps and women into sex objects without any real connection to their divine purpose and assignment.
And naturalism borrowed my car and didn't fill up the gas tank!
In a survey conducted for Mike Shoesmith's book "The Atheists are Wrong" one hundred percent of the atheists said they would eat another person to stay alive. This 1 - is not surprising and 2 - makes them cannibals by their own admission.
So... the whole point of Christianity is make sure that the Donner Party would have starved? Can't do without that.
By blindly believing the theory of evolution in spite of the plethora of researchers who have discovered mountains of evidence opposing it you have decided to borrow from the atheists.

Of course, whether the evidence actually does support evolution is (at least) a topic of controversy. Again, just assuming you've won a contentious (heh) debate is not really the acme of intellectual honesty.

More importantly, deciding propositions on the basis of evidence is naturalism. Simmons, in his inaccurate, dishonest, egregiously stupid way, is himself borrowing from naturalism. A True Christian™ would never stoop so low as to even bother considering evidence: scripture ought to be enough to settle the issue by itself, n'est pas?

Presently and absolutely undetectable gods

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 21, 2012
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In Strong atheism, two of the classes of definitions of god were absolutely undetectable deities and presently undetectable deities. Commenter Ben Wallis argues that these two classes of definitions render strong atheism untenable because "we cannot speak to the probabilities of deities in general." Ben argues that the definition of essentially undetectable is not, strictly speaking, meaningless, because the existence of an absolutely undetectable deity matters to a deity itself. Wallis argues that in a similar sense to the Bertrand Paradox, we cannot rigorously and unambiguously define the probability of any presently undetectable deity existing. Since we cannot rigorously definite the probability of a presently undetectable deity existing, it is unwarranted to hold any kind of probabilistic belief; weak atheism or agnosticism is presumably the preferred position.

While I don't entirely agree with him, I don't think Wallis is really that far wrong. The undetectable deities are already in the grey area of philosophical hair-splitting; the distinction between strong and weak atheism with regard to undetectable deities is similarly a matter of very fine, hair-splitting distinctions. New Atheism is primarily a political and social movement, and the only definitions that have political and social implications are the detectable, paranormal definitions (which I would assert, contra Wallis, encompasses Yahweh, Jesus and Allah). No actual believer talks about a perfectly deistic god who passively observes the world, and no one actually believes in a scaredy-cat god who's hiding behind the couch. Since the real debate is just about detectable gods (and what, precisely, we mean by "detectable"), we're not giving up any important ground to simply declare weak atheism and agnosticism regarding undetectable gods while still maintaining strong atheism regarding detectable gods.

I do, however, enjoy splitting hairs as much as the next philosopher, so I want to address Wallis' arguments directly.

Wallis argues against strong atheism with regard to to presently undetectable gods by invoking the Bertrand Paradox, which argues that it is possible to have mutually exclusive definitions of "random" that definitely give different answers to questions of probability. But one outcome of a careful examination of the "paradox" is that we can add a qualifier to the definition of randomness — the "maximum ignorance" principle — that seems to categorically disambiguate competing definitions of random: we can consider only those definitions that satisfy the maximum ignorance principle to constitute "true" randomness. If we assume this qualifier, Wallis fails to rebut my original argument.

On another view, the Bertrand Paradox doesn't change our view. If there is some ambiguity in the determination of the probability of some hidden deity existing, the range is either large or small. if the range of probabilities is large, then the definition is too weak to actually name a concept about which anyone can have any sort of belief. If the range is relatively small (e.g. between 10-9 and 10-12) then the ambiguity is irrelevant: no matter what the actual probability is, all the probabilities are low enough to warrant disbelief. Just as science does not include absolute certainty in its definition of knowledge, neither does it include absolute precision.

One might form a definition of a deity for which there was sufficient precision to be coherent and encompass a range of probabilities sufficiently high to warrant at least agnosticism, but I have not yet seen such a definition. The best attempt I've seen so far is the Fine Tuning argument, which has been decisively rebutted in a number of ways.

Wallis' objection to the absolutely or essentially undetectable deity hinges on a particular metaphysical view of ontology and epistemology. The scientific metaphysical system is epistemically prior: scientific ontology is just the narrative of what the world must be like to account for our knowledge. All apparently differing narratives that account for the exact same body of knowledge are, by definition, exactly equivalent. For example, the ontological narrative of (parts of) General Relativity can be expressed in two seemingly different ways: on one view, objects themselves become distorted in a gravitational field; on another, objects retain all their properties, but space itself is distorted in a gravitational field. Although seemingly different, physicists have (I'm reliably informed) determined that these two narratives always have the exact same epistemic consequences, and are thus saying exactly the same thing.

When a pair of statements in conjunction equivalently describe our actual knowledge, it's notable that the alternatives are not inverses of each other. P and not-Q in General Relativity above is not the simple inverse of not-P and Q. (The inverse of P and not-Q is not-P or Q.) Holding them as mutually exclusive alternative formations does not entail any contradiction. We have a different situation, however, when a statement (even a compound statement) and its inverse are epistemically equivalent. In this case, admitting the meaning of the statement entails a contradiction: To say, for example, that God exists and God does not exist are epistemically equivalent statements is to say that P equals not-P. To avoid the contradiction, we have to deny meaning to P: it is a category error to call it truth-apt.

It is not the case that one must adopt an epistemically prior metaphysical system, but neither is it the case, I think, that one cannot reasonably adopt epistemic priority. If Wallis wants to adopt an ontologically prior metaphysical system, then he might find strong atheism untenable, but if he wants to argue that my adoption of strong atheism is unreasonable, then he must either argue that it is unreasonable under epistemically prior metaphysics or he must problematize epistemically prior metaphysics.

Strong atheism, while not necessarily a required position (although I think ontological priority is a much more problematic metaphysical concept than epistemic priority), is, I believe, a tenable position.

Measuring the Labor Theory of Value

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 19, 2012
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For a while, I've been trying to put the abstract labor time on the price (Y) axis of the standard economic graphs, such as the Marshallian Cross (supply and demand graph). But I think this view is not correct. I think, rather, that we should put abstract labor time on the quantity (X) axis. The Y axis then represents the "hidden" utility. Our interpretation, then, changes from what is the marginal utility (price relative, c. p., to the prices of all other goods) of the q-th commodity (1,000,000th coat, 17th airliner, etc.) to the utility of the q-th labor hour devoted to the production of that commodity.

We can do this, I think, because the quantity of a commodity produced is a relatively simple function of the actual hours used to produce it. It might not be strictly linear — there are declining returns to scale — but it's still going to be monotonically increasing for the most part: the more hours we spending producing something, the more of that something we'll produce. It avoids a whole division step (hours to produce one commodity divided by hours to produce another) in creating production possibility frontiers and calculating opportunity cost.

The opportunity cost calculation becomes a lot easier now. The supply curve now has a very natural, obvious reason for sloping upward: For low quantities of labor used to produce some commodity, we are "stealing" labor time from the least valuable alternative commodities; as the quantity of labor increases, we must steal labor time from increasingly valuable alternatives. The macroeconomic interpretation, usually interpreted with real GDP on the X axis, then becomes directly a measure of employment; a recession is underemployment; inflation is (more-or-less) over-employment*; and optimal GDP is optimal, "full" employment**.

*Not too many people employed, but rather people employed making too many things that are unwanted.

**Note that modern economists' observation of "full" employment being between 4-5% includes structural, politically-motivated and -enforced unemployment of minorities and other marginalized groups. I'm coming to believe that the true Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) is below 1%. In other words, a "5%" NAIRU is basically 0.5-1% unemployment among privileged groups (mostly white men) plus much higher political unemployment in other marginalized groups.

Fairness and value

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 17, 2012
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In his essay, The Income Gap: Is the Distribution of Money Fair?, Mark Thoma finds that the present unfair distribution of income is in at least some sense "unfair", and attributes the cause to failures of perfect competition. Thoma believes that unlike Marx's labor theory of value, the more modern marginal utility theory of value provides a satisfactory account that everyone — capitalists, landlords, and entrepreneurs as well as laborers — gets their fair share of economic activity. However, we can be assured of a fair distribution only if the assumptions of perfect competition actually obtain in real life, and Thoma believes that the real world does not even come close to embodying these assumptions. The cure, presumably, is an expanded role of government to enforce perfect competition and thus ensure fairness of outcome.

Thoma begins his article by drawing a sharp contrast between Marx's labor theory of value and the marginal subjective utility theory of value. I do not believe the contrast can be drawn so sharply: rather than contradicting one another, the marginal utility theory complements and expands the labor theory of value: The marginal utility just makes more explicit Marx's notion of socially necessary labor time*. The marginal utility theory is a theory about demand; we still talk about the supply in terms of total embodied labor**, some discounted from a previous accounting period. Even marginal utility theory still concludes that there is some specific amount of socially necessary labor time necessary to produce a commodity at equilibrium, where rising marginal cost of supply (in actual labor time) equals falling marginal utility of demand. Since these numbers are, by definition, equal at equilibrium, we can represent the not-directly-measurable subjective demand in terms of the directly measurable labor time that constitutes the actual cost of supply.

In Capital, Marx is not, I think, interested in giving a rigorous account of exactly what the socially necessary labor time actually is. It's going to be something and it's going to be measured in actual labor costs. What Marx considers important is that all commodities, including and especially labor power, will trade at this cost.

**Technically abstract labor time, which accounts for varying disutility of specific kinds of work and work environments: an hour spent in a sewer is, ceteris pariubus worse than an hour spent in an air-conditioned office.

Thoma does not want to talk about fairness per se — economics is descriptive, n'est pas, not normative — but he asserts that perfect competition leads to at least one kind of fairness: under perfect competition, everyone gets out of the national economy what they put in. It's important to understand, however, that under the marginal utility theory of value, this conclusion is at best true by definition. A central assumption of marginal utility theories of value is that value cannot be measured directly; we can draw conclusions about value only from the behavior of the market. If apples trade for $2.99/lb., then that's the only measurement we can ever have about the value of an apple... or at least the marginal value of the last apple sold. Likewise, we can measure the value of what a person puts into the economy only by measuring how much money they receive for doing whatever it is that they do: laboring, owning capital or land, or being all entrepreneur-y. And of course what a person gets out of the economy is defined directly by how much money they have received. We cannot idependently determine whether or not perfect competition is actually fair; perfect competition in a free market is essentially one definition of fairness.

But Thoma seems wants to have his cake and eat it too. If perfect competition in a free market is an accurate and complete description of economics, then it is true whether we like it or not. If it is inaccurate or incomplete, then deciding whether or not to implement it is a normative question, not a descriptive question. If perfect competition is really true, then the distribution of income is perfectly fair right now; indeed any distribution of income is fair by definition. If perfect competition is not true, then Thoma is making a purely normative argument: we ought to create an economic system that either actually is or acts like perfect competition. But that would beg the obvious meta-ethical question: why should we implement perfect competition as a definition of "fairness"?

There are, I think, a lot of parallels between the discourse on economics and the discourse on religion. One prominent theme in religion is the debate — a legitimate debate between rational people of good will — over religious "moderates". Both sides oppose religious "fundamentalists". On one side are those who say that because religious moderates are indeed moderate, we should except their religion from sharp criticism: if our goal is moderation, then it doesn't matter how anyone gets there. On the other side — the side I prefer — are those who say that because both religious moderates and religious fundamentalists both use religion to justify their positions, and there is no rational, empirical way to judge between their differing uses of religion, the moderates in a sense philosophically support the fundamentalists. (It gets worse: granting foundational authority to the literal meaning of scripture, the fundamentalists seem to have a better case than the moderates.)

Similarly, the debate between "moderate" capitalist economists such as Thoma and capitalist "fundamentalists" turns in no small part on the non-empirical exegesis of classical economics. There's a lot more going on in economics, of course, than an intellectually honest examination of the foundations of capitalism. But the parallel still holds: capitalism, like any other social endeavor, has underlying ethical norms. At some point, distorting these ethical norms to the reality of modern society becomes untenable, and we must fundamentally rebuild them.

Real and financial economics

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 12, 2012
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It's not just laypeople who make this error: Paul Krugman chides St. Louis Fed president James Bullard mixing up real and financial economics.

Yes... the president of the Federal Reserve regional bank of St. Louis doesn't understand the difference between actual physical things and the symbols that represent them. These are the people who end up making economic policy under capitalism.

The Stupid! It Burns! (cranio-rectal inversion edition)

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 9, 2012
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the stupid! it burns! Atheists – get your heads out of your asses.
I’m getting pretty damn peeved with the attitude that seems to be mainstream within the atheist groups etc as of late. They think themselves far superior to the poor, feeble minded little theists who’re blind and must depend on an imaginary friend to get them through life. Remind me, how exactly are they supposed to be any better? I never used to have any issues with atheists but they are now proving themselves to be just as bitter, closed minded, arrogant and downright condescending as those heavy, closed minded christians they despise!

Strong atheism

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 8, 2012
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Strong atheism is the belief that no deity actually exists. To support this position, we have to consider several substantively different definitions, or classes of definitions, of "deity".

The first class, deity1, is the class of contradictory or meaningless definitions of "deity". We can safely affirm that no being exists with contradictory or meaningless properties. For example, the omnimax deity is either contradictory or meaningless because of the problem of evil. It is a contradiction that an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity would permit evil in the world. Alternatively, we don't know what evil is (we are mistaken in some mysterious way) or there is no such conceptual category as "evil"; in this case, "omnibenevolent" is meaningless. The omnimax deity is offered as an example; finding that some particular definition of deity is not in the class of deity1 does not rebut the idea that we can safely deny the existence of any deity1.

The second class, deity2, is the class of undetectable (i.e. "supernatural") deities. Again, we can safely deny the existence of any deity that is, by definition, completely undetectable. To affirm or deny the existence of such a deity is to say exactly the same thing about the world of experience. An undetectable deity entails its own subtle contradiction: it is exactly the same to say, "Deity2 exists," and to say "Deity2 does not exist."

The third class, deity3, is the class of presently undetected deities. These deities are only detectable under some special circumstances that do not (presently) obtain on Earth. These deities are detectable only after death, or are hiding behind the couch, or on Achernar III, or somewhere else presently inaccessible. The problem is that there are an infinite number of definitions in this class; the probability that any one definition is true, especially a definition that names a finite number of deities, is infinitesimal and warrants disbelief until evidence becomes accessible.

The fourth class, deity4, is, by definition, presently detectable, but strongly paranormal (contradicts our ideas about physics). The evidence presently available, by the definition of paranormality, argues against such a deity. Deities which are detectable only privately fit this definition, because private knowledge (about anything but the content of one's own mind) is itself paranormal. (Note too that having an unusual sensory modality is not private knowledge, since someone who has even a unique sensory modality can prove its existence to someone without it, rendering that modality public.) Of course, the evidence might be sufficient for us to revise our concept of normality, but so far all attempts have fallen flat. Given that human beings have been looking for such a deity for many thousands of years, the failure to find one is itself sufficient evidence to warrant belief that no such deity4 exists.

The fifth class, deity5, is, by definition, presently detectable and not strongly paranormal. This definition includes "God is everything that exists", or "God is the [human emotion of] love." In the atheists' view, a deity5 is no deity at all; the speaker is using metaphorical or figurative language, and we are not literary critics.

All classes of definitions have sufficient warrant for either disbelief, disinterest, or exclusion from consideration. We cannot, of course, be certain that none of these deities (except perhaps deity1), but the preponderance of direct and indirect evidence warrants strong atheism.

The definition of atheism

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 8, 2012
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In "Defining Atheism: Examining the Atheists’ Case, " Albert McIlhenny gets at least one thing right: "Of course, the whole thing is quite silly." The issue is not what the definition of atheism "is", the issue is which of the different definitions to use in different circumstances.

The two most common definitions of atheism are: "a lack of belief in a deity" (sometimes qualified as "weak" atheism), as well as "belief there is no deity" ("strong" atheism). Both are applicable under different circumstances. If atheists were asking for social, political, or legal privilege, the second definition would be better: it would be inappropriate, for example, to insist on privilege if strong atheism were unjustifiable. If we want to explain the broadest definition that encompasses most people who self-identify as "atheist" (and no one is an atheist who does not intentionally and individually chose to apply the label to herself), weak atheism seems obviously preferable. One who believes there is no deity certainly lacks belief in a deity; all strong atheists are ipso facto weak atheists. So the weak atheism is preferable.

There are other circumstances, notably theists who want to position themselves as contra atheists. Such theists, I think, are better served by employing the weaker definition. The weaker definition is more general. If you can prove the stronger definition false or unjustifiable, you've said nothing about the weaker definition, and nothing about theism. If you can prove the weaker definition false or unjustifiable, however, not only does the stronger definition falls automatically, but the case for theism is definitely strengthened.

Strong atheism is also equivocal without further qualification. What does the strong atheist mean by "deity"? "Deity" is itself an ambiguous, equivocal term. There's no help for that — natural languages are fundamentally equivocal — but it does mean that anyone addressing the subject must carefully avoid straw man fallacies and fallacies of equivocation. Even the strongest atheist does not claim that God is definitely not hiding behind the couch. (A strong atheist such as myself argues that a being who can hide behind the couch, or on Achernar III, is by definition not a deity.) Weak atheism is also equivocal, but the equivocation is almost irrelevant. I certainly lack belief in particular concepts and constructions of "deity" about which I'm ignorant; unlike strong atheism, which requires a lot of unspoken qualifications, weak atheism can stand on its own. Arguing against weak atheism is not only more directly probative of theism, it avoids all sorts of argumentative pitfalls that can derail a discussion.

If you want to talk about strong atheism, do so by all means. But if you do, you're going to end up talking about epistemology, ontological commitment, the ethics of knowledge claims, etc. In other words, you'll be doing philosophy. Philosophy is not about the search for answers, it is the exploration of questions. Strong atheism is one interesting starting point for the exploration of questions; it's a bad place, however, for the search for any definite answers.

The Stupid! It Burns! (MRA edition)

Published
by
The Barefoot Bum
on February 7, 2012
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the stupid! it burns! Weird, eh? an MRA saying something stupid. Yet here it is:

Why are atheists so religious?
The problem I have with atheists is that they are too religious. Yes, I mean that literally. For when you wipe away all the bombastic bellowing about empiricism and the strident mocking of those who choose a life of faith, what you are left with is a population of people that surrender their reason and cognition as though they were at gunpoint; that hit their knees as fast as any Catholic...to worship at the altar of feminism. ...

In the rank and file of vocal atheists ... what I have found is a culture of indoctrinated clones, with no more discernment of fact and fiction than you would find at a Branch Davidian revival. Indeed, they are so ideologically rigid that the only things these people are missing are shaved heads, tambourines and two weeks without a shower.

At least the metaphor is good.