In other news, I decided to give up eggs and dairy for Lent. I wrote about the decision for the Yale Daily News, which the Huffington Post also picked up.

Things are pretty rad.

Are we natural creationists?: Jesse Bering, author of  the forthcoming Why is the Penis Shaped Like That?, released an excerpt his of 2011 book, The Belief Instinct, on his SciAm blog. He argues that we born with cognitive biases that predispose us to seeing purpose and design in order, citing the work of my senior thesis adviser, George  Newman. Give it a read, and, if you like it, preorder The Belief Instinct in paperback. I highly recommend it.

Goodbye G-Spot, hello Confluent G-Zone: Dr. Amichai Kilchevsky, Urology Resident at the Yale-New Haven Hospital, recently combed through more than 60 years of studies in a recent metaanalysis published in the January 12th edition of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, determining that the G-spot is not a defined anatomical structure. But don’t despair, ladies and lady-pleasers, Jezebel writes that something is still going on in that area:

When you put pressure on the anterior wall of the vagina, it pushes on other things in the vicinity that respond to stimuli, including the urethra and clitoris, which Dr. Komisaruk says is “shaped like a wishbone and extends further down the vagina.” He says it’s all about the confluence of a number of different genitally sensitive organs.” Ooh, confluence. That sounds nice. Maybe we should ditch G-area and just start referring to it as “my confluence.”

Are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater?: Alain de Botton has stirred the pot with his recent TED talk entitled Atheism 2.0. He argues that atheists shouldn’t be so quick to ditch classically religious practice along with the content we object to. I’m sympathetic, but even if you aren’t, it’s an interesting talk.

Singles are dropping: Sleigh Bells kills it, Nicki Minaj less so.

So the hard drive in my laptop is dead, which makes doing computer things (like say, daily writing for my Daily Themes course, or blogging) a lot less convenient. But my schedule for this semester is set, and I’m getting ready to buckle back down and start blogging. But in the mean time, Yale in the winter is gorgeous. This photo has been circling around Facebook all day, and it seems that the source of it is currently a mystery (if anyone knows, I’d love a heads up to give some credit). I still find it insane that I go to school here, sometimes.

In other news, I’ve been invited for a few graduate school’s visitor’s weekends and I’m still a bit overwhelmed and excited. I’m also stressed about not only selling myself to all of these PhD programs, but I also have a tough decision of actually choosing between the programs that admit me (that is, of course, should any decide to admit me!). But I’ll be sure to write about my experiences there while I’m travelling in the next month.

More posts coming soon!

Apologies for the slow week. I’ve been preoccupied with: finalizing my class schedule, doing daily writing assignments for my Daily Themes course (Yale’s, if not the nation’s, oldest writing class), drinking Johnnie Walker Black with my campus’ secular group in memory of Christopher Hitchens, attending a celebratory Martin Luther Kings Cup gathering, discovering the hard drive on my laptop was broken (currently being tinkered on by student techs to see if it’s reparable), and receiving an invitation for an interview at 2 of my 3 top choice grad programs (still waiting on the third, fingers crossed?).

More posts will be sure to come in the next few days!

Via CBS Local Denver

Continually seeking to test the adage that “all publicity is good publicity,” Dave Silverman, President of American Atheists, has most recently taken to talking about Tim Tebow.

CBS Local Denver interviewed Silverman, who claimed that Tebow was bad for football and a hypocrite.

“It’s not that Tebow prays, it’s that he waits for the cameras to be on him to do it,” Silverman says. “He’s totally faking.”

I don’t follow football in the least, and I don’t care much about Tebow at all. I still find him obnoxious, though, and am happy to see him pretty regularly poked fun of for his zealotry.

But I’m not going to imply the guy is insincere or a hypocrite just because I don’t like him. For all I know he’s a great Christian with all kinds of real religious faith. I don’t know, and I frankly I don’t care. But it bothers me when the president of an organization that is meant to represent atheists, regularly makes claims he doesn’t know a thing about. I don’t know if Tebow is sincere and Silverman doesn’t either, so it’s hard to see this as Silverman doing anything more than actively trying to be as controversial a dick as possible.

Though we should all be happy about the inevitable success of the First Amendment in a case the school must have known they would lose, many atheists seem to be missing another seminal ruling on religious freedom that they may be less happy about: Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States recognized a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws. The New York Times reported the case in this morning’s paper, saying

Chief Justice Roberts devoted several pages of his opinion to a history of religious freedom in Britain and the United States, concluding that an animating principle behind the First Amendment’s religious liberty clauses was to prohibit government interference in the internal affairs of religious groups generally and in their selection of their leaders in particular.

“The Establishment Clause prevents the government from appointing ministers,” he wrote, “and the Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.”

I’m not nearly knowledgeable enough in law or political science to formulate a really solid opinion on this case, because I have somewhat mixed feelings. On one hand, the government shouldn’t be telling churches what to believe or who to hire. On the other hand, the tax exempt status of these churches make me uneasy.

Others are raising concerns about future difficulties combating sexual abuse or harassment. The executive director for the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rev. Barry W. Lynn, wrote in a statement:

Blatant discrimination is a social evil we have worked hard to eradicate in the United States. I’m afraid the court’s ruling today will make it harder to combat.

Chief Justice Roberts, however, ensured that protections would be in place.

One of the classes I’m most excited for (and think I’ve settled on taking) is the Cognitive Science of Ignorance, a seminar about how we make sense of the world given how little we actually know. So much of our knowledge, especially about science and the natural world, is seriously misguided, and I think our beliefs about them are oftentimes unjustified. This great xkcd strip I think really clearly highlights the issue: none of us know at all how airplanes work. I was told as a kid in science classes (and on TV, and everywhere) that planes fly by creating lift from the shape of their wings. But if that’s true, how do planes fly upside down? The story is in fact much more complicated.

Frankly, it seems so often that we just hear something as “science” and accept it just as such. I’m almost certain that if you probed an average atheist or skeptic (someone who isn’t a specialist in biology or environmental studies) about evolution or climate change, they would frankly know way too little to justify the beliefs on their own. My professor suggested that what’s really the difference between us and evolution or climate change deniers is how much we trust the scientific method and the state of modern science (and I think on this point a lot of us are justified, though I’m skeptical even here that many of us know how the process works well enough to seriously justify confidence in it). I think that’s more or less exactly true.

So this class is addressing really interesting psychological and philosophical material, and I’m really excited to delve in. Hopefully, I’ll be sharing some of what I learn on here. After all, this is a blog more or less founded on realizing what you’ve failed to see, and how we make beliefs based on little information (and how they’re updated) seems to me pretty relevant.

But on to the actual study. The Friendly Atheist writes:

Somehow, we’re less trusted than even rapists. That’s disheartening, but it really says more about how religious people think than anything about atheists.

And he’s partway right: if we were less trusted than rapists that would be really disheartening and controversial, but thankfully, as I wrote last month, it’s not at all true.

But since I’m still working my way through the finer nuances of blogging and writing more generally, I’ve learned that I can occasionally suck terribly at explaining things. Reading through some comments on the article, it looks like people aren’t quite following what I meant to say. There are also a lot of common objections I’ve read, particularly with how I addressed the issue of a ceiling effect. So I think with those in mind, the study deserves another pass.

To just summarize my last post, there were basically two problems with the press this paper was getting. First, there was a problem with how people were interpreting the graph that’s been circulated (from those who claim that atheists are more distrusted than rapists), and second, there’s a problem with the measure the authors of the study used (not necessarily for the purposes of the paper, but for the purposes of supporting the claim that atheists and rapists are similarly or comparably mistrusted).

For the first claim, if you take a look at the graph, it reports the number of participants in the study who performed what’s known as a conjunction fallacy. The claim that participants made this fallacy more for atheists than rapists (and thus trust atheists less than rapists), is not at all supported by the data. Looking at how huge the error bars on the graph are, it’s almost guaranteed that any difference between the two is simply statistical noise due to a small sample size. (The error bars are the thin lines going up and down from each bar, which represent the range where the real value of the statistic lies. Big error bars mean that you can’t tell exactly where the actual value is.)

As for the content and methods of the study, the participants were asked which was more likely: that a terrible person was a teacher or a teacher and x, where x was either a Christian, Muslim, rapist, or atheist.

A moment of reflection or knowledge of basic probability should make it clear that it’s always more likely for the terrible person to be a teacher rather than a teacher and something else. But we have a known bias called the representativeness heuristic, which leads us to make errors in judgment like this. We don’t see terrible behavior as representative of a teacher, but we do see it as representative of a rapist (or perhaps an atheist), so we see that option as more likely.

But this doesn’t support the conclusion that the two are similarly mistrusted, because as I argued, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of a ceiling effect. In short, a ceiling effect in this instance might go as follows: people just aren’t that likely to make the conjunction fallacy. No matter how representative a distrusted group may be for immoral behavior, it could simply be the case that most people just won’t make the error (that is, the measure hit a ceiling in sensitivity). If x was anything that was stereotypically associated with distrust, be it an atheist, rapist, burglar, Neo-Nazi, or whatever, it could be that only about half of the participants might fall for the trick. It would be similar to reading the results of a really easy test. You’d see a difference in scores only for the less bright kids, but past a certain point all the marginally intelligent kids (as well as the brilliant kids) look about the same, because of the ceiling (a perfect score). So it’d be a mistake to say two kids are just as smart because they have the same score on a test, because the test might not be very good at measuring what it’s supposed to. A situation like this might be going on here with distrust in this study (and I think it is, considering how crazy the claim people are making from the results).

I’ve seen some comments dismissing my post by suggesting that I posit a ceiling effect without any evidence, but that’s precisely backwards because science is in the business of ruling out alternative explanations for the claims you make. If the data could be accounted for by two different stories—either that atheists are more distrusted than rapists (a shocking and outlandish claim, thus the huge press surrounding it) or that the measure the study used wasn’t very good—then to say “this study found that rapists are more trusted than atheists” isn’t at all justifiable because it does nothing to rule out the alternative.

There are some broader theoretical points worth making too, I think. Implicit measures such as these often don’t report explicit attitudes or predict some behaviors very well, but rather just report whatever stereotype is most readily accessible. For example, implicit measures of African Americans tend to show racist attitudes, even from other African Americans. The effect goes away, however, if participants are primed with high-achieving examples of African Americans, such as President Obama. Often simply the presence and availability of a stereotype can strongly influence such measures, so it’s always important to be careful about reading too much into the results of studies with implicit measures such as these.

Essentially, it’s just an absurdly strong claim that the data don’t support which, incidentally, the authors of the paper weren’t even trying to make. A lot more work needs to be done to support a claim as counterintuitive as “rapists are more trusted than atheists (or comparably trusted, or whatever),” and until good reasons to actually believe a claim like this surface, I’m more than confident dismissing it.

So hopefully this time I made the point a bit more succinct and clear. If I’m missing something or still failing on any explanations, do let me know and I’ll edit or try again as necessary.

SMBC is by far one of my favorite webcomics. Make sure to click the link so you can check out the red button.