On this blog, The Brights’ Net is hosting a few contributors from the constituency at large. The contributors are writing as individuals on topics of interest to them, while authoring from an overall perspective of having a naturalistic worldview, free of supernatural and mystical elements.

With today’s high unemployment rates and increasing student loan debt levels, many Americans question whether a college education is worth the cost.  An article written by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol at FoxNews.com in May 2013 answers the question “Is College Worth It?” with an unenthusiastic “It depends”.  The authors give several reasons for their ambivalent response:

  • Student debt is growing, as well as defaults on student loans
  • The cost of a college education is expensive and increasing
  • There is high unemployment among new college graduates
  • A recent study found “only 45 percent of college graduates made substantial gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills in their first two years of school”
  • Many traditionally challenging courses have been replaced with less rigorous “novelty” instruction on pop culture
  • College campuses are mostly politically liberal havens “rife with binge drinking, illegal drug use and the degrading ‘hook-up’ culture”

The authors point out that a student’s choice of major can greatly affect his or her financial future, noting that STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors are paid more and have better employment rates compared to other majors, like psychology, English or political science, as well as which school the student attends, since brand-name schools may offer more opportunities than other colleges.

The article ends by highlighting the shortage of workers in jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree (but do require more than a high school diploma), such as nurses, welders, electricians, air traffic controllers, IT technicians, and plumbers.

The points in the article are the usual ones made when arguing that college degrees are no longer worth the cost of obtaining them.  Typically, such arguments present just part of the picture by ignoring the alternative option of NOT getting a college education.  The arguments against a college education usually depict how some graduates are struggling economically and fail to recognize that those college graduates are competing for jobs and pay not just among themselves but also against all other job seekers, including those with only a high school diploma who are struggling even more.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that holders of a bachelor’s degree and higher who were 25 years old and over in 2012 had an unemployment rate of 4.0%, while high school graduates without any college had an unemployment rate of 8.3%.  And a Forbes.com article cites U.S. Census Bureau statistics showing that in 2011, college graduates made 82% more than those with high school diplomas.  So even if unemployment is increasing and earning power is decreasing for college graduates, the figures are even worse for high school-only graduates.

The other points made by the FoxNews.com article should also be compared to the alternatives for a more complete picture.  Student debt and loan defaults are growing, but how big a problem is this in the larger context of increasing mortgage defaults and credit card debt of all Americans?  Is it possible that, compared to other types of debt, student loans still make better financial sense?  And referring back to the article, if 45% of college juniors showed little improvement in critical thinking, reasoning and writing skills, then 55%, or the majority, DID show improvements.  Did the majority of high school-only graduates likewise show advances in such critical skills two years after graduation?

Arguments about lax courses and liberal college campuses are more about a student’s lifestyle preference than whether college is worth the cost—college campuses are not the only places where high school graduates may encounter excessive drinking, illegal drugs, and liberal attitudes about sex.  And while growth in the number of available skilled labor jobs that do not require a college degree (and cannot be easily outsourced to overseas workers) is a positive development, domestic workers increasingly find such jobs offer only short-term employment as automation, industry consolidation, and technological obsolescence take their toll.

Getting a college education is certainly not the only way to achieve personal satisfaction, gainful employment, and professional or financial success, and a college degree is no guarantee of future success.  The cost of a bachelor’s degree is indeed great enough that careful consideration must be made about college being the right choice for a particular individual.  But be sure your research looks at the entire picture and at whether the alternative of NOT getting a college education is really worth it.

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not cheerfulI’ve experienced the pull of positive psychology since it was called humanistic psychology, back in the 1970s or before. Newly re-packaged, with a lot of recent research backing up what to me seems, by now, like common sense, this field aims to turn self-help into a science.

You want to be happy, or happier, or live a better life? Fine, here’s what you need to know. Yet, more than just how to make life better for yourself, the full spectrum of what positive psychology can do includes making life better for others, too.

Thus, here we have a book entitled Pursuing the Good Life: 100 Reflections on Positive Psychology, by Christopher Peterson, one of the founders of the field of positive psychology. He died unexpectedly at age 62, before this compilation of his bite-sized blog posts came out.

I’ve chosen some of the ideas mentioned in the book that have perhaps been less publicized and that fit well with what makes sense to me personally as a Bright.

3 INSIGHTS:

1. Keep Your Bucket List to Yourself

Peterson may have lived his life without feeling the need to check off items on a list. Though he acknowledged that bucket lists do serve to make certain events more memorable, most such lists, in his estimation, often contained narcissistic wishes that wouldn’t necessarily make for a more meaningful life. He wrote that those items that might connect you to something larger (family or whatever) would, according to positive psychology, lead to more fulfillment.

In an aside, Peterson wondered how many items on some people’s bucket lists would be deleted “if he or she were not allowed to talk about them to others.”

2. Must You Be So Cheerful All the Time?

Peterson equated conspicuous cheerfulness (or glaring glee or eternal ebullience) with conspicuous consumption. He found it forced and insincere. Sometimes I wonder if it’s insincere so much as evidence of people deluding themselves, purposely putting a positive spin on everything to deny reality or because they fear that if they admitted anything less upbeat, they’d be accused of being depressed.

Peterson’s examples include when someone responds, “Great!” to how they’re doing, each and every time. My favorite example would be the way a lot of people on Facebook, Twitter, et al, seem to have, for the most part, terrific days and meals and books and relationships and lives. I feel I have to stifle any comment I might make that isn’t 100 per cent agreeable. Is positive psychology to blame? Peterson asked. And he answered that sincerity trumps satisfaction. A little less conspicuous cheerfulness might help us all achieve our real goals.

3. Small Talk Won’t Make You Happy

Peterson based his ideas about small talk—which he felt he was good at—on a single study, but I believe there’s a definite common-sense aspect to consider. Small talk is chatter about inessentials. It can be socially useful and convenient when you don’t want to get real, or really deep. But it can also be boring and get in the way of genuine engagement with another person. The study mentioned by Peterson found that the extent of small talk was negatively associated with happiness.

It’s possible that extroverts get something from a lot of small talk that introverts like me are simply missing. Maybe it’s odd, but I find a real conversation, whether with a friend or a relative stranger, vastly easier to take part in and infinitely more gratifying.

Kylie’s Heel, my first novel, comes out soon in paperback and e-book. Read reviews and pre-order.

Copyright (2013) by Susan K. Perry Follow me on Twitter @bunnyape

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Voices Heard Photo by: Ken Kilgore

Voices Heard
Photo by: Ken Kilgore

15 April 2013:  Boston Marathon bombing kills 3

17 April 2013:  Texas fertilizer plant explosion kills 14

20 April 2013:  earthquake in China’s Sichuan province kills 179

21 April 2013:  “Mommy, what’s wrong with the world?!”  That was the first thing my nine year old son Evan blurted after hearing about the devastating earthquake in China that occurred the day before.  When asked what he meant, he reminded us that there seemed to be a lot of death and destruction lately, and the news keep getting worse.

While the causes of the deadly events of the week of 15 – 20 April were completely different and unrelated—a deliberate act of domestic terrorism, an industrial accident possibly caused by operator negligence, a naturally occurring geological phenomenon—one could forgive a child being spooked by the clustering of such incidents in a span of less than a week.  Even for an adult like me, it was as though I barely had time to process emotionally the sadness and solemn sentiments of one event when the next struck me in the gut.

Though we live in Utah, far from the epicenters of these tragedies, Evan’s words show that we still feel some of the pain and despair that people involved with or closer to the events must have experienced.  The emotional impact of so many deaths and injuries is somewhat diluted by distance but nonetheless can be felt by people across the globe.  Maybe for a moment, this empathy binds us all together in compassion and grief.

So it is in this spirit of shared humanity that I call attention to a point of contention that might be seen as petty compared to the genuine pain suffered by the victims of these events, but deserves notice as an example of why Brights should press for participation and equality in civic affairs.

A story that has been running in several online U.S. humanist and secularist media concerns the Interfaith Service held on 18 April at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross.  This memorial service for the victims and survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing was organized by the Massachusetts Governor’s Office as a public event to help the community to heal by sharing in the grief and achieving some sense of emotional closure.  Government officials such as President Obama, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, and Boston Mayor Menino spoke at the service, as well as representatives from various faiths including the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions.

According to the stories in the secularist media, requests were repeatedly made to the organizers of the service to include representation of the non-religious residents and citizens of Boston, but these appeals were ignored.  The snub was viewed as deliberate by some writers:  “Humanists excluded from Boston Marathon Interfaith Service” raged Michael Stone of examiner.com; “After Boston Bombs, Atheists Denied Healing” declared James Croft on patheos.com; “Atheists barred from Boston bombing memorial attended by President Obama” blogged Stephen Best on volconvo.com.

Actually, atheists, humanists and secularists were not barred from attending the service and many did, so the more extreme headlines misrepresent the facts.  But as Stephen C. Webster writes on The Raw Story, the lobbying office of the Secular Coalition for America (an advocacy group for the nontheistic in the U.S.) contacted multiple times the senior members of the governor’s staff who organized the vigil but their appeals were rejected.

This was particularly painful for Boston’s atheists because one of the victims of the bomb blasts was a respected volunteer of the Harvard Humanist Community; both her legs were amputated and her daughter was injured in the bombing.  Inviting a representative of Boston’s secular/humanist/atheist community would have helped achieve the service’s goal of inclusiveness and bringing everyone together to start the healing process.

I do not expect that every minority group could or should be represented in such official memorial services.  My wife’s faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was not represented, and she didn’t complain (though her foundational Christian religion was VERY WELL represented).  And some comments on the secular media sites expressed the notion that, since this was an interfaith service, there shouldn’t be a problem if people without faith aren’t represented.

But as many others have argued, this was an officially sanctioned event, organized by the staff of elected government representatives and meant to be THE official public memorial service that brings all communities together, and was attended by the mayor, the governor and the president.  So even if every minority group could not be officially recognized, couldn’t there be at least an acknowledgement that people without faith also grieve and need to heal without feeling like the only way to do so is outside the larger community?

How should Brights respond?  Do we demand inclusion, representation and acknowledgement of people with a naturalistic worldview in all such government sponsored events?  Or do we insist that such events honor the U.S. Constitution by being completely secular, so as not to give any religion or faith official sanction?  In any case, it seems clear that it will take many more voices demanding inclusion before we are heard as full members of the larger community.

References

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religious baby?“You ruined my life,” my mother told me. The first time she said it was decades ago, when I first married, and she’s repeated it more than once since then.

The distress I caused her (which, perhaps oddly, never seemed to impact our loving relationship), was due to my marrying a non-Jew. Nominally, he was Greek Orthodox.

He and I had two children. And, according to ancient superstition, Jewish women have a supernatural power to bestow (inflict?) a religion on their young from birth. Thus my kids became Jewish, too.

Their father thought it wasn’t a parent’s role to influence his kids’ beliefs, so he didn’t even try to answer their big questions. The boys and I celebrated all the traditional Jewish and Christian holidays in a light-hearted way. If I had to do it again, I’d make up my own rituals and my own special days.

When we divorced and I remarried 13 years later, I again chose a non-Jew, this time someone who was raised Protestant but who isn’t even certain what branch. But it didn’t matter as much to my family. You see, I’d had my tubes tied by then. The funny thing is that the only “religious” disagreement he and I ever have is over his insistence on calling himself technically an agnostic, rather than an atheist like me.

‘TIL FAITH DO US PART

I recently read ‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America, by Naomi Schaefer Riley. It’s a thorough sociological look at what happens when Americans of differing religious beliefs marry, raise children, celebrate major holidays, and divorce one another (not necessarily in that order). Most of these mixed couples start out believing that love will conquer all differences, which is often the case. At least until there are progeny in the mix. And then, some adults find themselves clinging more tenaciously to the rituals and certainties they themselves were raised with.

Apparently, according to Riley’s broad research, Jews marry out of their “birth” faith most often, Mormons least, and Muslims in the middle of the range. Rates are increasing, and younger generations seem to care less about all this.

Reading Riley’s book at this stage of my own evolution was a strange experience. All those nonsensical beliefs, all those quandaries in which mixed-faith couples find themselves at different times in their relationships! And rather than finding wise relationship guidance in the words of their religious leaders and books, they are told they are going to hell if they screw up, or letting down centuries of their people who suffered and died for the faith, or dooming their children to confusion, rootlessness, and amorality. Such so-called wisdom appears obscene to me.

However, if your religious beliefs or rituals or birth culture retain any importance to you, and you’re of marriageable (or remarriageable) age, reading Riley’s book may offer you a dose of reality beyond thinking, “Oh, we’ll work it out, it won’t matter.”

Because it turns out, to many people, that intermarrying ends up mattering more than they expected. Riley herself admits to an occasional sense of loneliness when she participates, without her husband, in her local Jewish community’s events, which she began doing, well, religiously, when they had kids.

Then again, my dad won’t even go with my mom to High Holy Day services, and they were both raised Jewish. At which point she yells at him and blames him for ruining me.

There are many ways to be lonely.

Copyright (2013) by Susan K. Perry … Follow me on Twitter @bunnyape.

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In front of Huayna Picchu. Photo from: Ken Kilgore

In front of Huayna Picchu.
Photo from: Ken Kilgore

“If you love your child, send him out into the world.”

─ Japanese Proverb

I inherited my love for travel from my father, who had joined the Navy when he was eighteen to see the world (and to avoid going to college).  While I was in college, I made a vow to myself that, at a minimum, I would someday visit the following world heritage sites:

  • The pyramids of Giza in Egypt
  • Angkor Wat in Cambodia
  • Machu Picchu in Peru

In my 20s, when I was still single, I checked the pyramids off my list.  In my 30s, I married Ptarmi, who is as adventurous as I am.  Early in the spring of 2000, we decided to check another site off my list:  Machu Picchu, the so-called “Lost City of the Incas”.

After a couple months of preparation, we arrived in Lima, the Peruvian capital.  Following two days of sight-seeing, we packed up our bags and flew to Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Incas.  Our arrival coincided with a political rally that brought dozens of flag-waving, banner-carrying Peruvians onto the streets, shouting slogans against then-President Fujimori.  Fortunately, the demonstrations were peaceful and the staff of our 5-star hotel discretely and professionally ensured our security.

There are several options for traveling to Machu Picchu.  Ptarmi & I felt the hybrid train – short Inca trail route suited us best since we didn’t have the time or the camping equipment for the four day trek on the Inca trail.  We boarded a train departing from Cuzco and got off 6 miles from Machu Picchu.  At the time, hikers could strike out on the trail themselves as we did, but must be accompanied by tour guides now.

We arrived at Intipunku—the Sun Gate—by late afternoon.  This gate marks the end of the Inca trail and is the doorway to Machu Picchu, which lies below.  After hiking on the narrow, moderately strenuous trail for hours, the first view of the city through the gate is breathtaking.  Exploring the ruins had to wait till the next day since the site was ready to close when we arrived.  We stayed at a 3-star hotel in Aguas Calientes, the town in the valley below Machu Picchu.

Early morning the next day, a bus took us from Aguas Calientes up the steep, winding road to Machu Picchu.  The city was shrouded by a blanket of clouds that drifted slowly by, allowing glimpses of the ruins bit by bit.  It reminded me of a scene from Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Castle in the Sky, when obscuring clouds part to reveal the fabled floating fortress for the first time.

Machu Picchu is full of marvels:  astronomical, technological, agricultural, archaeological, cultural, natural.  But I expected these.  What I didn’t expect was the city’s stunning beauty—not just the beauty of the site, but the city itself.  The ancient inhabitants had devoted considerable time and effort to civic beautification projects.

For example, outdoor public squares are connected to other areas by long stretches of broad stone steps.  In one such span of stairs, I noticed a narrow channel through which water trickled, cut into the stone flanking the steps.  I followed the flow of water down the steps and noticed that the channel split sharply into two separate arms, then converged a short way down, forming the shape of a four-sided diamond.  The rejoined channel ended abruptly at the end of the stairs, causing the water to fall in an artistically pleasing arc into a shallow stone basin below.  A fountain!

Lacking iron tools, Inca artisans used sand as grit and relatively soft bronze and copper tools to grind the channels into the stone.  This painstaking work took years, probably decades, just to produce a water fountain with no other purpose than for the public to enjoy.  Incredibly, the fountain still works, and it continues to delight.

I came across another example in one of the residential ruins.  The lodging looked typical, rectangular and not very big.  The stacked-stone walls were pierced by several characteristic trapezoid-shaped windows.  Standing inside the room and peering out through a window, I was struck by the magnificent view outside.  I realized then that the builder must have consciously placed the window there to frame the view perfectly, to create a wall mural of such jaw-dropping beauty that it reaches across centuries, cultures and languages to connect me aesthetically to the Inca builder.  At that moment and place, I shared a human appreciation for the world’s splendors with someone who had lived and died six hundred years ago.  That is travel–time travel–of the best kind!

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Article by Davis Jacobson

“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

–Brown and Williamson, 1969 (internal memorandum, found here)

It is often lamented that there are misunderstandings of scientific findings in the general public. There’s no blame there; science is what scientists do, not what non-scientists do. I think people can be forgiven for lacking expertise on whatever subject happens to be under discussion at the moment.

More concerningly, some special interests have played upon these misunderstandings to their own advantage or that of their constituents. This is unfortunate, but it is to be expected in an unregulated marketplace of ideas.

Nevertheless, if a concerned citizen or policy-maker needs to take actual action on science-related issues, it is quite important to place our bets on the best information available, and that information can often fairly be said to come from science.

Science itself can be a source of confusion — if only because scientists and non-scientists don’t always use language in the same ways (or because certain background assumptions differ between scientific and casual speech). Today I’d like to touch on a few words that are often sources of confusion in and of themselves.

“[P]ropositions to which no competent man today demurs.”

–Charles Sanders Peirce

Uncertainty:

Precision vs Accuracy

(a) Neither precise nor accurate (b) precise and accurate (c ) precise but inaccurate. Procedural methods can correct for systematic biases like in (a) and (c )
Image: Public Domain

“Uncertainty” is a measurement of the accuracy of measurements, and scientists evaluate it in well-defined ways. They can

    • Understand the uncertainty empirically, for example by making numerous measurements with a particular tool and observing how accurate it is in practice (Type A evaluation of uncertainty), or
    • They can predict uncertainty based on what is known of the measurement system or experimental method (or common sense): “Because our machine way built this way, it can’t be more accurate than that.” This is Type B evaluation of uncertainty.

Uncertainties are known, quantifiable sources of measurement variation that can be sensibly accounted for (large PDF) in scientific procedure and reporting. There are even scientific studies of uncertainty itself!

Uncertainty is a mathematical entity describing the experimental range of measurement. Uncertainty does not mean doubt.

Error:

In scientific usage, “error” is used in several unique ways, not all of which mean “mistake.” More-commonly mentioned errors include:

  • Type I errors, errors in which a “null hypothesis” is rejected while true (for technical reasons, this confusingly results in a “false positive” error), and
  • Type II errors, or false negative error.
  • Other statistical errors, such as “sampling error.” (Sampling error quantifies the likelihood that a subgroup of a population, for reasons of accident, does not represent the whole population accurately).
  • Systematic errors, such as the change in length of a measuring rod with temperature (may be addressed by Type A or B evaluation of uncertainty).
  • Random errors (ibid).

Note that the first four usages can all be defined mathematically to mean specific things in statistical studies and can be quantified and accounted for in scientific practice and reporting.

In casual speech, people usually aren’t talking about the results of solving mathematical equations when they say things like, “I made an error,” but in scientific speech, it cannot be assumed that scientists have made a mistake when they report an error.

Confidence:

When all of the known uncertainties and errors in a scientific experiment are accounted for, we can state how confident we are in the result with another mathematical entity called a “confidence interval,” usually represented as a percentage probability. At the 95% confidence interval, there is a 95% chance that the mean of measurements interpreted to confirm a hypothesis falls within the range of values that would confirm that interpretation if the experiment were repeated. Here is a short video describing how to calculate a confidence interval.

Establishing high degrees of confidence with careful procedure and interpretation reduces the incidence of Type I and Type II errors. (The p-value measure of confidence is also becoming popular, but is beyond the scope of this article.)

Scientific studies are usually not published unless their findings are meaningful at the 95% confidence interval.  In any event, there are strong conventions to report the confidence interval of a scientific report, whatever it may be. Here is a paper that explains why the confidence interval should be reported in medical papers, and assumes reporting at the 95% level.

The careful ways in which scientists account for error and uncertainty, and the honesty they demonstrate in disclosing their uncertainties and confidence, persuade me that their reports are trustworthy.  In and of itself, this distinguishes science from other ways of knowing: knowability itself is a knowable quantity.

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Photo by: Ken Kilgore

Photo by: Ken Kilgore

“When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.”

─ African proverb

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe….  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.  Time to die.”

─ Roy Batty, Blade Runner

In 2008, a number of significant life events converged that spurred me seriously to ask myself what it means to be alive.  I had turned 45 that year, thereby entering my “mid-life” phase.  A relapse of acute leukemia meant I had to endure stronger doses of chemotherapy, total body irradiation, and a bone marrow transplant.  My 6 year old daughter had just started kindergarten and my 3 year old son started his 1st year of pre-school (we were living in Japan at the time).

Each round of chemo required that I spend six weeks in a hospital ward, allowing me a lot of time alone to ponder the “big” questions.  Because religion has never played a large role in my life and I’ve called myself an atheist since high school, my thoughts mostly centered on the mundane and practical:  are my health and life insurance plans in order?; are our finances effectively structured to support my surviving family?; is my living will up-to-date?; am I satisfied with where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and what I’ve done?; will my kids remember me?

The last question was the hardest to answer and I realized that my only regret about dying then is that my kids would grow up not knowing much about their dad.  As a student, I was quite active in civic and public affairs, but grew increasingly private as I got older, so few people knew me outside my circle of family, friends and co-workers.  I had neither the talent nor the creativity to write “the great American novel”, so I knew that I was leaving little of my unique individuality to posterity.  Was there anything I could say or do in a short time—while confined to my hospital bed—that would make any difference?

My family visited me every afternoon during my extended hospital stays.  During such visits, my daughter often played her “What’s Your Favorite?” game, where she asks the rest of us questions like, “what’s your favorite color?”, “what’s your favorite movie?”, “what’s your favorite animal?”, etc., until we’re all sick of answering.  It occurred to me that one way for my kids to know who I am (or who I was) is to write a list of all my favorite things in the world.

The project started simply, as merely a list of things I like.  But as the list grew longer, it became more complicated.  It was hard to pick just ONE favorite for each topic, so I started creating categories of things.  My focus on this project grew in intensity, and it evolved into a record of more than just my favorite things–practically a memoir of my experiences, only in a list format.  I even started doing on-line research to “fact check” names, addresses, dates, and other references.  The research became quite involved, but the best thing about the project is that it was still fairly easy to write.

The project is now called “My Life Lists”.  At 40+ pages, it’s still a work in progress—I continue to add to it and edit it occasionally.  Here are a couple of examples:

  • My favorite movie scenes
    • “A Year of Living Dangerously”:  Guy and Jill in an outdoor café get caught in a sudden downpour
    • “Star Wars—A New Hope”:  Luke gazes at a binary sunset on Tatooine
    • “Fifth Element”:  an alien opera diva sings an excerpt of the “mad scene” aria from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor
    • “Gallipoli”:  Archie and Frank climb the pyramids of Giza
    • Etc.
  • My favorite culinary experiences
    • Ryouhei Sushi (Tokyo):  salt sherbet; frozen basashi (raw horse); grilled whale
    • Honeymoon trip dinner at L’Auberge Provençale in White Post, Virginia (1997)
    • “Canadian” Christmas dinner at Carmen Fournier’s house (Augsburg, 1989)
    • Dinner with Ptarmi at an Amazon jungle lodge, by lantern light and with monkeys running around us (Peru, 2000)
    • Etc.

Additional sample topics include:

  • Continents  and countries I visited (and cities)
  • U.S. states (and cities) I visited
  • Favorite music/soundtracks by genre
  • Best Friends (sorted by location)
  • Favorite sports/physical activities I do
  • Cars owned/borrowed (from parents)
  • Favorite language expressions/bon mots

I also included wish lists, like:

  • Things I want to see happen in the world by 2050
  • Life Lessons I want my kids to learn

I recommend compiling your own lists if you’re looking for a way to record a bit of your life experiences and personality traits.  It requires less time and resources than scrapbooking or cataloguing a videography, and less commitment and effort than starting a full-fledged book or a diary (though I’ve kept a daily journal for the last 15 years).

What ideas have you had for preserving that library that is uniquely you?

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puzzleGood writing and clear thinking don’t always go hand in hand. It’s a pleasure, then, to find both in a book about going it alone–using rationality rather than supernatural entities to face reality–titled 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists.

In one volume, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk, idiosyncratic essays by a range of atheists are featured, from science fiction authors and philosophers to scientists and activists. Only a few names were previously familiar to me (Michael Shermer, James Randi, Peter Singer, Dale McGowan). It’s a geographically diverse group, too, with writers from India, Scotland, England, Australia, Germany, Nigeria, and the U.S.

There’s even an enlightening essay by Sean Williams, an Australian speculative fiction author, titled, “Doctor Who and the Legacy of Rationalism.” Williams, noting that the popular television show features “frequent references to the Judeo-Christian faith,” goes on:

So whence arose my burgeoning sense of a-religiosity? The answer is not difficult to find. It resides in the series’ steady commitment to rationalism and the scientific method. ‘Everything that happens must have a scientific explanation,’ the Doctor says, ‘if you only know where to look for it.’ This message is consistently emphasized when church and faith rear their heads, as they do on numerous occasions, along with the show’s other enduring villains.

Other personal turning points in this volume include such incidents as the following:

1. When she read the World Book Encyclopedia from A to Z, Margaret Downey (founder of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia) “discovered the difference between mythology and reality. The many gods that had been created by man became evident.”

2. When Michael Shermer, who had become a “born again” as a high school senior, attended a college class in which it was “okay to challenge any and all beliefs without fear of psychological loss or social reprisal,” he realized how insular his worldview had been. He is now Executive Director of the Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine.

Available in ebook, too. Read an excerpt and the table of contents from Voices of Disbelief here.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Susan K. Perry *** (Follow me on Twitter @bunnyape)

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Photo by: Ken Kilgore

Photo by: Ken Kilgore

Article by Ken Kilgore

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

─ Derek Bok

I majored in Biology in college, but it wasn’t till I read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World:  Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996) years later that I consciously developed a consistent and rigorous critical thinking process that applies to life in general.  In his book, Sagan devotes a chapter to equip readers with a “baloney detection kit” that contains tools for evaluating new ideas and discriminating between accurate reflections of reality and false deceptions.

Some of the tools included in the kit are (as quoted directly from the book):

  • Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
  • Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past.  They will do so again in the future.
  • If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise)—not just most of them.
  • Quantify.  What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.

Nearly every day, I use one or two baloney detection tools when critical thinking is needed to make a decision.  But I had the opportunity to use several tools at once a couple years ago when a neighbor enjoying his walk saw me working in my front yard and came over to chat.  My family had recently moved back to our old neighborhood in Utah after having lived in Japan for five years, and the neighbor and I hadn’t had the chance to catch up on each other’s lives since our return.

My neighbor noticed that I had lost weight, so I told him that I was treated for acute leukemia in Japan and while I am doing fine now, it will be another two years before I’m considered cured.  In the meantime, I exercise, watch my diet, and take about a dozen meds daily to maintain a delicate balance of my immune system.  At this point, my neighbor’s eyes lit up as he excitedly said he had just the thing for me.  He ran home and then returned to my yard with several pamphlets and a two-page stapled paper print out.

“Now, you’re half Japanese, right?  Have you heard of Kangen water?” my neighbor asked.  When I confessed that I hadn’t, he explained that the Kangen water process was invented by a respected Japanese scientist and that drinking this water will surely provide me with amazing health benefits, as stated in the colorful marketing pamphlets.  Hoping to appeal to my scientific bias, the print out was a copy of a medical paper describing how the permeability of a certain tissue in a human subject increased when water with a basic pH was transfused, or something like that.

In short, the Kangen water process claims to rearrange water molecules into hexagonal structures that more easily permeate hard-to-reach thirsty tissues, and the water’s alkaline pH reverses all the supposed damage caused by the acidity of our body.  These benefits come from just drinking a reasonable quantity of Kangen water every day.

When I expressed fear that such powerful stuff might affect the meds I take and upset my immune system, my neighbor assured me that “it’s still only water” and there will be no side effects or interactions with drugs.  “It’s just clean, healthy water.”

As a neighborly gesture, I agreed to review the literature and check into the product over the next couple of days, but using critical thinking tools and skills, it took less than ten minutes to realize that the Kangen water process is a fraud.

The pamphlets contained only anecdotal declarations of the benefits gained from drinking the water, without any control subjects or independent, 3rd party confirmation of the claims.  The factual errors and misunderstanding of basic water chemistry in the literature would be obvious to even a high school science student.  The print out’s medical article seemed legitimate, but it described a situation of infusing alkaline water into a specific body tissue via an IV or hypodermic injection and says nothing about whether such water taken orally will survive the acidic environment of the stomach and reach specific tissues.

Normally, it’s enough I figure out for myself that such a product is mere baloney.  But when I learned that this particular Kangen device (basically a filter, an electrolyser and a mixer for adding alkaline chemicals to ordinary water) costs $6,000, I felt sorry for my neighbor who had invested his limited time and resources in his sincere but false hope of making money and improving the wellness of his friends and neighbors.  Had he employed basic critical thinking skills and the baloney detection kit, he might have been spared from being so rudely conned financially, intellectually, and morally.

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Fingers_crossedSteven Pinker is a major modern thinker and atheist, so when I got a paperback copy of his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I read it seriously. All 700 pages of it (add another 100 for notes, references, and index).

Could it really be true that human societies are less, rather than more, violent than at previous times in recorded history? Even considering how modern media pummel us with outrageous incidents of brutality, war, and crime?

The key to the truth of Pinker’s claims may lie in that simple single word: outrageous. That fact that extremely violent events outrage us, that they’re not ordinary, may show that we’ve indeed come a long way toward conquering violence.

Pinker offers graphs and charts and an extraordinarly amount of historical evidence and psychological insight in an attempt to prove his thesis. There was no way I could absorb all of it from a single reading, but I did learn a  few things.  Allow me to share the following:

6 Snippets about Violence & Human Nature:

1. Lives began to be more valued than souls somewhere in the second half of the 17th century, thus lessening the likelihood that one would be killed “for the wrong supernatural beliefs.” This positive development came along with the rise of skepticism and reason.

2. A crime surge in the 1960s reversed a long trend of decline. Pinker suggests this was most likely related to baby boomers having a new sense of solidarity due to TV and those newfangled transistor radios, as well as the civil rights movement and a general mistrust of every social institution.

3. Novels may increase empathy. “The explosion of reading may have contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution,” wrote Pinker, “by getting people into the habit of straying from their parochial vantage points.”

4. World War I has been called the first “literary war.“  Indeed, in my own experience, some of the war stories and poems from that era are incredibly moving. One wonders how anyone can still feel the same about the viability of war after reading them.

5. Potential for peace in the Middle East? Possibly, if diplomacy treated the disputants as what Pinker calls moralistic actors and framed a peace agreement in a different way, one that could more readily be accepted by those with a “mindset of sacredness and taboo.” (Good luck with that.)

6. Optimism is called for, according to Pinker. To boil down the point of his book, it’s to offer hope to the doomsayers, regarding violence, nuclear devastation, even climate change. If optimism is necessary for action, then he may have a viable point.

P.S. The image above, of crossed fingers, relates to early Christian superstitious belief. I use it here with tongue-in-cheek irony.

Copyright (2013 by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D.

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