Interesting articles in The Economist

A few articles of interest from the last couple of issues of The Economist:

February 23, 2008: "Moral thinking," a summary of recent research that sheds light on human moral reasoning processes. Video here. (A related, more in-depth story is Steven Pinker's "The Moral Instinct" which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on January 13.)

March 1, 2008: "Winds of change," a summary of research to use breathalyzer technology to diagnose medical conditions.

"Telltale hairs," about new methods of forensics to use hair analysis to identify a person's location at a given time (based on water consumption--could drinking imported bottled water be used to thwart this?).

SkeptiCamp 2

On Saturday, March 22, the second SkeptiCamp will take place, in Castle Rock, Colorado. Reed Esau, one of the organizers presenters (also known as the originator of the celebrity atheist list), reports that the James Randi Educational Foundation will be sponsoring the event this time, and the list of likely speakers looks quite interesting:

Some of those who plan to present have posted their intentions: writerdd on 'How I Became a Skepchick', Gary on pareidolia, R. G. on the Family Tomb of Jesus, Abel on Weapons of Mass Deception, Linda Rosa on Therapeutic Touch, Larry Sarner with a legislative update (on naturopath licensing), Crystal on a the new Fund for Thought initiative, Joe (a pediatrician) dispelling myths about vaccines and autism, Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society makes another appearance, Amy on why women need to be active in the skeptic movement, Jeanette on denialism, Rusty on the reproduction of JFK ballistics test, Paul on the scientific understanding of mystical, psychic, and occult experiences, Marlowe on a Gemini-1 mission UFO cover-up (?!) and/or how scammers victimize seniors, Pete on the Scientific Method and me on the basics of Modern Skepticism.

Check it out.

(Previously.)

UPDATE (March 24, 2008): Reed has written a summary of the event.

Expelled Exposed

The National Center for Science Education has put up a website, ExpelledExposed.com, to respond to the dishonest intelligent design movie featuring Ben Stein, Expelled. The current content is links to news coverage and reviews of the movie, but I expect the site will become more interesting when the movie is actually released on April 18.

The Wire's War on the Drug War

The writers of perhaps the best show on television, The Wire, have published an opinion piece in Time magazine in which they advocate that jurors vote to acquit any drug case defendant, and state that they will do so:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

I agree with them. (And if you want to know how government and other institutions in the real world actually work--or fail to do so--The Wire offers a good education, perhaps approached only by a completely different kind of show, the British comedy Yes, Minister.)

Hat tip to Tim Lee at Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.

Richard Dawkins lecture at ASU

Tonight we attended Richard Dawkins' lecture (first stop of a 2008 college tour) at ASU's Grady Gammage auditorium on "The God Delusion," which was the 2008 Beyond Center lecture, introduced by Paul Davies. The lecture was accompanied by a giant screen on which the words of the lecture appeared for the hearing-impaired, apparently based on voice recognition. I was pretty impressed--it was far more accurate than the typo-laden closed captioning that you can see on television, and kept up pretty closely with him, but it did make errors from time to time (some of which it corrected). My favorite uncorrected error was early on, when Dawkins was making the point that atheists disbelieve in just one more god than the countless gods that theists disbelieve in, and listed Zeus and Wotan among them. When Dawkins said "we don't worship Wotan," the captioner said "we don't worship Voltaire."

Dawkins began by saying that "this is the largest audience I have ever addressed." Originally ASU just asked people to submit a form on a web page to indicate desire to attend, but they had such great response that they had to issue tickets through Ticketmaster. There were more people who didn't get tickets who also showed up, and some of them were able to be seated in empty seats which were held for ticket holders who didn't show up by 7:15 p.m. (the lecture started at 7:30 p.m.). The auditorium was very nearly full to its capacity of 3,017 seats.

I still haven't yet read Dawkins' The God Delusion, but I believe most of his lecture was drawn from the book's content, accompanied by a slide presentation. At the end, he showed some twenty books that have been published in response to the "new atheists," most of which were directed at his book. For good measure, he included a picture of the cover of a book titled The Dog Allusion.

He also responded to those atheists who have criticized him for intemperate and inflammatory language directed at religion, pointing out that far more inflammatory language may be found in London restaurant reviews (with several hilarious examples). He disagreed with the idea that religion deserves special treatment to be exempt from criticism, and quoted a passage from his book describing the God of the Bible which could be considered intemperate and inflammatory (e.g., God is "a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully"), but which he characterized as less inflammatory than the restaurant reviews. I think it was quite similar in character to the restaurant reviews he quoted, only less hyperbolic and more accurate.

He ended with some "consciousness-raising," showing a photograph of three four-year-olds taken at a Christmas pageant play published in a British newspaper, along with its caption, which described them as "Muslim," "Sikh," and "Christian." Dawkins asked us to imagine instead that they were labeled "conservative," "liberal," and "socialist," or "atheist," "agnostic," and "secular humanist," observing that these are all equally absurd. While it would be accurate to describe them as children of parents who are Muslim, Sikh, and Christian, a four-year-old is not old enough to have considered opinions on cosmology or anything approaching a critical world view. (My thought was that this is somewhat agist, and there are many adults haven't given their religious views much more thought than most four-year-olds. But I think his basic point is sound.) During the Q&A, he was asked if he thought four-year-olds could be atheists, and he said he thought the same point applied--it's not accurate to describe a four-year-old as an atheist, either.

In another question, someone asked whether Dawkins had a background in theology, to which he referred the audience to P.Z. Myers' "The Courtier's Reply" at Pharyngula, which he recommended that everyone Google and read as he didn't think his paraphrase did it full justice.

One individual asking a question said that he is an atheist with a friend who is a very intelligent Mormon who he frequently converses with and believes he has helped lead to some mutual understanding and perhaps even some change in his views. He questioned Dawkins' approach. Dawkins responded that "seduction" is not his style, but commended the questioner and stated his approval for different styles of atheism, comparing it to a "good cop, bad cop" methodology.

I found little to disagree with in Dawkins' presentation (and little of which I've described above, due to lack of note-taking). There were perhaps a few points where he presented metaphysics as science, but I agree with his point that science and religion are not "non-overlapping magisteria" (as Stephen Jay Gould put it) and that religions do make empirical claims and are criticizable when they contain false, ridiculous, unsupportable, and immoral statements.

UPDATE (March 7, 2008): John Wilkins has posted some critical comments about Dawkins' lecture, which may be a topic of discussion when I meet him on Saturday for beer and conversation with John Lynch.

John Wilkins writes that:

In particular I was annoyed that those of us who do not condemn someone for holding religious beliefs were caricatured as "feeling good that someone has religion somewhere". Bullshit. That is not why we dislike the Us'n'Themism of TGD. We dislike it because no matter what other beliefs an intelligent person may hold, so long as they accept the importance of science and the need for a secular society, we simply do not care if they also like the taste of ear wax, having sex with trees, or believing in a deity or two. Way to go, Richard. Good bit of framing and parodying the opposition. Real rational.

While I agree with Dr. Wilkins that the particular beliefs he lists are not objectionable, I very much do care if people hold beliefs which cause them to engage in political actions such as denial of rights to homosexuals, female genital mutilation, honor killings, issuing of fatwas, suppression of factual information and dissemination of misinformation about evolution, and so forth, which I believe is the primary concern of Dawkins, as well. The mere belief in God is not a problem (as Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg"), it's all the additional baggage that religion typically brings along that causes the problems. (Likewise, mere lack of belief in God is not a problem, but it also seems to frequently be accompanied by political baggage.)

Wilkins writes as though the majority of religious believers in the world fall under 100-200 on the scale in this video for calculating your "God Delusion Index," while I suspect Dawkins' (and I know that my) concerns are primarily with those who score much higher than 100. (My own score was not zero--it was 45.)

A few other blog posts reacting to Dawkins' lecture:

Labyrinth: A Maze of Ramblings
Lone Locust Productions
A post at the Motley Fool atheist forum

I also should mention that Dawkins used one of my favorite arguments for the falsity and social transmission of religion, which is that people tend to believe the religions of their parents (and this is still the case despite the fact that in the U.S. a large minority of people tend to change religious sects within a religious tradition). Dawkins showed a map of the world displaying large geographic areas as represented by adherents of particular religions, and commented on how odd that fact is, if religion is supposed to be true. For contrast, he showed the same map, with the names of religions replaced with various scientific theses, and observed that that doesn't happen. (In actuality, it does happen from time to time in science--some scientific disputes have divided upon regional lines, though typically evidence on the dispute builds and the regional division goes away, replaced by consensus.)

John Wilkins is unhappy about Dawkins' advocacy of truth as something that we care about from science, stating that we only care about good enough (pragmatism), not truth. I disagree--I don't think that even "good enough" can be talked about without reference to true predictions, at the very least, and I think Dawkins is quite right to care about truth. Certainly it can be hard to establish what is true (it's often easier to establish what isn't true), and it's a mistake to become wedded to a particular theory as true if that causes you to ignore anomalies and contrary evidence, but I likewise think it's a mistake to say that science doesn't care about getting true explanations.

I'd also like to add a comment about one of the exchanges in the Q&A that came from a religious believer (of whom there were many in the audience--I was coincidentally seated a few seats away from a gentleman who is in my parents' Bible study class, who had with him a worn and heavily annotated copy of Dawkins' book as well as a copy of one of the critiques published, The Dawkins Delusion). That person suggested that Dawkins was mistaken to assert (which he didn't, at least not at the lecture) that religion was the primary cause of war without providing empirical evidence. He stated that this is certainly something that can be empirically studied, and that he doubts that it is true. He also stated that studies have shown that religious believers tend to be happier, are more likely to give to charitable causes, even non-religious charitable causes, than the secular, and so forth. (I've previously blogged about studies which show that religious believers are more generous than the secular, and conservatives more generous than liberals.) Dawkins' response was that he didn't say what the questioner thought he did, and also observed that the two largest wars in the world's history (WWI and WWII) were not about religion, and that the studies referred to by the questioner may be correct, but that they miss the point. For Dawkins, having better social consequences is not a reason to believe in religion if the religion is not true--it's truth that is the closest thing to sacred for Dawkins.

UPDATE: P.Z. Myers takes issue with John Wilkins' criticisms of Dawkins.

A poor quality video of the lecture (via cell phone?) is on Google Video.

UPDATE (March 13, 2008): Chris Hallquist reports on Dawkins' appearance in Madison, Wisconsin.

UPDATE (March 24, 2008): Near the end of Dawkins' talk, he showed this YouTube video of a Marcus Brigstocke rant about religion. (Thanks for the link, Tim K.)

February Maricopa County Notices Update

It looks like I picked the wrong month to slack on an update to my graph of Phoenix area pre-foreclosures, as January's notices of trustee's sales climbed to an amazing 5336!

That's 1461 higher than December's number, and when you consider that last January's number was 1623, and that the peak seen by the bursting of the Tech bubble (which, by the way, is hardly noticeable in this graph), in January, 2003, was 1738 I think it becomes clear that we are witness to something rather scary.

February's number dropped to a measly 5048.

RateMyCop

RateMyCop.com is a new website that allows you to rate individual police officers on the basis of your interactions with them, on the attributes of authority, fairness, and satisfaction, for which you can rate them poor, average, or good, and leave specific comments about your interactions. The site describes itself like this:

Welcome to RATEMYCOP.com, the online watchdog organization serving communities nationwide. RATEMYCOP.com is not affiliated with any government agency; we are an independent, privately managed organization.

Our mission is to compile information on cops’ performance and to provide a forum where users can freely share individual accounts. Good, bad or indifferent. Most of all, we would like to hear your stories. Your appreciation and your disapproval. Did you witness a cop doing a good deed, or were you involved in an unfortunate altercation? Tell us about it. Tell others about it. Let it out. Don’t feel intimidated by the badge to remain quiet.

While we respect their authority we are also free to question it. You have the right to remain informed.

The site has lists of 120,000 individual police officers from 450 departments around the country, which the site obtained directly from police departments, asking only for the names of patrol officers who work with the general public, not undercover officers. There are no photos, addresses, or telephone numbers, only names.

The city of Tempe has expressed disapproval and its intention to try to remove this information from the site, according to an ABC 15 News story which claims the site is a danger to officers. Tempe Police Department Officer Tony Miller is quoted in the story raising issues about undercover officers, and the article says that he "feels as though officers like him are scrutinized enough." The article also states that "Tempe officer Brandon Banks says the department's chief, human resources and even the city's prosecutor are looking into the website and fighting it." I don't see that they have a case, this information should all be a matter of public record.

It seems to me that there is potential for abuse (especially in the form of inaccurate ratings and comments, just as on teacher rating websites), but less so than there is from other kinds of public records about all of us that are published on the web. I disagree with Officer Miller's opinion that there is already sufficient accountability for police officers; this blog's previous posts in the "police abuse and corruption" category and the far more numerous and detailed posts from Radley Balko's The Agitator blog and his article "Overkill" are overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It's worth noting that the courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no duty of police officers to protect individual members of the public, and many states have statutes which prevent individual officers and departments from being held civilly liable for a failure to provide adequate protection, a fact often used by gun advocates to argue for widespread gun ownership for individual protection (e.g., here, here, and here). The U.S. Supreme Court also eliminated a major protection against police abuse in 2006, when it ruled in Hudson v. Michigan (PDF) that evidence from an illegal no-knock raid need not be excluded from trial, because police officers have entered a new realm of "professionalism" in which they recognize civil liberties and can be trusted to investigate and deter their own abuses. In the wake of such decisions and continuing abuses, a website such as RateMyCop.com seems to me like a good idea.

What the site seems to be missing, though, is a way to quickly find officers who have received ratings (very few seem to have any yet), and to sort those in order to find those with favorable or unfavorable ratings.

UPDATE (March 12, 2008): Apparently GoDaddy has pulled the plug on RateMyCop.com's website without notice to the owner, allegedly first for "suspicious activity" and then for exceeding bandwidth limits, and the site is up with a new web hosting provider.

It looks like the ratings are now on a single category, and you can see a list of the most-rated and most-recently-rated on the front page. Another feature that would be nice would be a way to allow registered users to rate the raters for reliability, similar to the way Amazon.com book reviews can be rated as helpful or not helpful. That way, ratings could be weighted based on judgments of the reliability of the raters from the user base, and ratings from those with a personal axe to grind could have their weight minimized.

Looks like Rackspace has also refused to host ratemycop.com.

Interestingly, apparently Gino Sesto of RateMyCop.com was a Bush voter.

McCain thankful for support of raving nutcase

John McCain is "very honored" for the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, a televangelist who thinks that the Jews provoked the Holocaust, that the Illuminati is engaged in conspiratorial control of the world's governments, that the Catholic Church is the "whore of Babylon" in the Book of Revelations, that George Washington hid a picture of a menorah in the tailfeathers of the eagle on the dollar bill, and that a U.S. invasion of Iran is prophesied by the Bible.

Ed Brayton has discussed Hagee's views, and Troutfishing at Daily Kos has some videos documenting Hagee absurdity.

UPDATE (May 22, 2008): Finally, McCain has repudiated Hagee's endorsement, claiming that he's only just learned of his nastier views and remarks.

UPDATE (May 23, 2008): Hume's Ghost points out the difference between McCain's relationship with Hagee and Parsley, and Obama's relationship with Wright, as well as the extremely nasty anti-Semitic remarks from Hagee that prompted McCain's repudiation (all Jews have "dead souls," for example).

Pat Boone's Limitless Stupidity

Pat Boone writes a column in which he imagines a conversation between himself and Thomas Jefferson, in which he completely misrepresents Jefferson's views and quite a few facts. Ed Brayton supplies a critique. (You can find the link to Boone's column there.)

Jeremy Jaynes loses appeal on spamming case

Jeremy Jaynes, the spammer who was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison in 2003 for violating Virginia's anti-spam law, has lost his appeal before the Virginia Supreme Court in a 4-3 ruling. Several of the dissents claimed that Virginia's anti-spam law, which criminalizes unsolicited bulk email with falsified headers, even if it is political or religious in content rather than commercial, is a violation of the First Amendment. The quotations from Justice Elizabeth Lacy and Jaynes' attorney Thomas M. Wolf both state that the law has diminished everyone's freedom by criminalizing "bulk anonymous email, even for the purpose of petitioning the government or promoting religion."

Both Lacy and Wolf misrepresent the law, which makes it a crime to "Falsify or forge electronic mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail through or into the computer network of an electronic mail service provider or its subscribers."

There is a difference between forging headers and sending anonymous email--the latter does not require the former, and the latter is not prohibited by the law. Jaynes wasn't just trying to be anonymous--he was engaged in fraud, and falsifying message headers and from addresses to try to avoid the consequences of his criminality. He wasn't using anonymous remailers to express a political or religious message, and if he had been, he wouldn't have been able to be charged under this law.

UPDATE (September 12, 2008): The Virginia Supreme Court has reversed itself and struck down Virginia's anti-spam law as unconstitutional, on the grounds that prohibiting false routing information on emails infringes upon the right to anonymous political or religious speech. This is a very bad decision for the reasons I gave above. There are ways to engage in anonymous speech without doing what Jaynes did, falsifying message headers and domain names. The court's argument that one must falsify headers, IP addresses, and domain names in order to be anonymous is factually incorrect. Anonymity doesn't require header falsification, it only requires *omission* of identifying information.