Treating statistics sensibly

People love to quote statistical studies to support their claims. And often its just a matter of confirmation bias. The statistical studies may not provide the support required – or may suffer from all sorts of flaws.

We see a lot of this in discussions on health, diet and life style. But I have also noticed statistics being liberally thrown around when religion and religious attitudes are discussed. If there is any area ripe for confirmation bias this is certainly it.

Consider this little graphic below which appear at a dating site OKCupid (see The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’). Just imagine what negative conclusions one could draw about religion from that. To be fair, most references I have seen to it (all atheist – strangely, no religious sites are quoting it) do advise taking it with a grain of salt. (If you are interested have at look at the source. It provides other statistics from the study which will help make sense of this graph).

On the other hand, I have had statistical studies quoted at me which claim to “prove’ the religious people are happier, more honest, more moral, etc. Typical those quoting the studies have never bothered to check out the details and always ignore studies which might have provided different conclusions. In other words the normal confirmation bias.

Not about Einstein

Book Review: Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit by Krista Tippett

Price: US$10.88; NZ$12.97
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 23, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143116770
ISBN-13: 978-0143116776

The media reports of Stephen Hawking’s new book with co-author Leonard Mlodinow (The Grand Design) attracted hostile reaction from some theological quarters (see The Grand Design – neither God nor 42). This reminds me of similar treatment meted out to Albert Einstein in his time.

Einstein had many religious critics for an article of his on the philosophy of religion in 1940. An Episcopalian responded “to give up the doctrine of a personal God . . . .  shows the good Doctor, when it comes to the practicalities of life, is full of jellybeans”. He was accused of providing fuel for the fanatical antisemitism of religious bigots and told that he should “stick to his science” and stop delving into philosophy (sound familiar). And this from the founder of the Calvary tabernacle Association in Oklahoma City “Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, ‘Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from.”

Perhaps some of today’s scientists who hesitate to respond to their theological critics could learn from Einstein’s reaction. While criticising atheist reaction he described his theological critics as “numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it.”

Bus adverts a human rights issue

The atheist bus adverts issue continues. This controversy arose back in February when The New Zealand Bus Company reversed their original agreement to run ads (see New Zealand has bigots too). While the NZ Atheist Bus Campaign used part of their donated funds to run substitute billboard ads (see NZ Atheists Swap Buses For Billboards) they continued with a complaint to the Human Rights Commission about the bus company’s actions.

The Director of Human Rights Proceedings considered the complaint
and has announced his agreement that the bus company’s refusal to display the No God advertising constitutes prime facie discrimination on the grounds of ethical belief under the Human Rights Act 1993.

Iain Middleton, speaking for the Humanist Society of New Zealand, says his Society and the No God advertising group has accepted the Director’s offer to represent the case to the Human Rights Review Tribunal.

Only one official complaint

When the NZ Bus Company rejected the ads they claimed complaints from customers and staff. However, only one (1) complaint was ever made (by A. Renault) to the Advertising Standards Authority. In August the authority chairman announced:

“The relevant provisions were Basic Principle 4 and Rules 5 and 11 of the Code of Ethics.

The Chairman noted the Complainant’s sincere concerns. However, the Chairman confirmed that Rule 11 of the Code of Ethics made provision for the presentation of robust expressions of opinion from named and identified organisations, saying it was “an essential and desirable part of the functioning of a democratic society”. In the Chairman’s view this applied to the advertisements before her and there was no apparent breach of the Advertising Codes.

The Chairman ruled that there were no grounds to for the complaint to proceed.”

It’s interesting that the NZ Bus Company caved in to religious pressures which, on the evidence of a single public complaint, were so insubstantial.

I look forward to the findings of the Human Rights Review Tribunal in this case.

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Check out your ancestors

Here’s a handy little resource of anyone interested in evolutionary science – The Timetree of life.  It enables you to find the last common ancestor of two species. Or, as the website describes it:

“TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. A search utility allows exploration of the thousands of divergence times among organisms in the published literature. A tree-based (hierarchical) system is used to identify all published molecular time estimates bearing on the divergence of two chosen taxa, such as species, compute summary statistics, and present the results. Names of two taxa to be compared are entered in the search window and the results are presented on a separate page.”

You can try it out at the search page. Just enter two names and click on search. This is the summary of what I got for humans and onions. Yes, we diverged 1408 million years ago.

Trust the experts – if they say what we want

Scientific American has a short podcast on confirmation bias.  (Download the podcast) It especially relates to trusting experts in areas like climate change.

Christie Nicholson points out (see We Only Trust Experts If They Agree With Us):

We think we trust experts. But a new study finds that what really influences our opinions, more than listening to any expert, is our own beliefs.

Researchers told study subjects about a scientific expert who accepted climate change as real. Subjects who thought that commerce can be environmentally damaging were ready to accept the scientist as an expert. But those who came into the study believing that economic activity could not hurt the environment were 70 percent less likely to accept that the scientist really was an expert.

Then the researchers flipped the situation. They told different subjects that the same hypothetical scientist, with the same accreditation, was skeptical of climate change. Now those who thought that economic activity cannot harm the environment accepted the expert, and the other group was 50 percent less likely to believe in his expertise. The study was published in the Journal of Risk Research.

The investigators found similar results for various other issues, from nuclear waste disposal to gun control. Said one of the authors, “People tend to keep a biased score of what experts believe, counting a scientist as an ‘expert’ only when that scientist agrees with the position they find culturally congenial.”

So true. And I believe perfectly natural. Confirmation bias is a human trait that has to be overcome in science. Fortunately the requirement for validating ideas against reality and the social nature of scientific research helps this.

Why the beliefs?

The questions is – why do we have these beliefs? Perhaps we can understand their origins in areas like politics, religion and support for sport teams – often these beliefs are hereditary. But climate change is a different issue.

I think that a lot of the resistance to scientific knowledge on climate change come out of the nature of the problems and our psychological response to such situations. The problems seem so immense and long term it is tempting to adopt avoidance techniques.  Out psychological reactions to the problems caused by human influences on climate change seem to parallel our psychological handling of grief. We have reactions of anger, denial, selection of evidence, etc. Hopefully humanity as a who can reach the stages of acceptance and action before it is too late.

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• We Only Trust Experts If They Agree With Us (scientificamerican.com)

The Bible – a book review

I know you generally can’t rely on the book reviews on Amazon. But sometimes they can be humorous.

I came across some funny examples  in the reviews for The Holy Bible King James Version

Here’s one from Todd W. Hemphill:

After being told that this was a “Good Book” I was really looking forward to reading it.

Alas, it lost me almost immediately. For example; After several “days” of light the sun suddenly appears in the sky on the fourth day? I looked for a footnote to explain this obvious inaccuracy but found that the story lacks any supporting references what-so-ever. I Looked back at older versions of the book hoping for some explanation and only became more confused when it became clear that the earlier text has both the sun and the moon somehow wedged between two layers of water!

I also found many parts of the “Old” Testament downright insulting. For example, in the section called Leviticus we are told not to trip blind people or swear at deaf people! (Lev 19:14) Just who was this book written for that they needed to be told that it’s not cool to trip blind people!? And why is a woman “unclean” twice as long after giving birth to a female child than she is after giving birth to a male child? (Lev 20) I’m guessing a guy wrote this stuff!

So I skimmed through the first section of the book, which was filled with endless rituals involving sacrifices and other barbaric practices, and moved on to the “New” testament, hoping for the best.

What a disappointment! I found the main character, Jesus, was all over the map. One moment he was all forgiveness and the next he was telling people that they had to hate their families if they wanted to follow him. (Luke 14:26). In the chapter entitled Matthew, Jesus succeeds in removing demons from two locals only to cast them into the town’s herd of pigs who then race down a hill and drown themselves. The townies, who are naturally more than a little distressed at the loss of all of their pigs, ask Jesus to shove off and who can blame them! (Matthew 8:28-34)

By the time I read the part about Jesus berating a fig tree for not having figs on it I’d had enough. (Matthew 21:18-19)

To call this a “Good” book is truly a stretch. Don’t waste your time!

There are are few others reviews there which adopt the same approach.

James Version.

A scientific consensus on human morality

There has been some local discussion of the scientific approach to morality. Unfortunately some of this has concentrated on only one source (a TED talk by Sam Harris – see Can science answer moral questions?). I believe Sam makes some interesting points and am eager to read his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values which will be published next month. (I am planning to review it then). However, he is just one person, has tended to concentrate only on the problem presented by advocates of moral relativism, and has not actually done any significant research in this area.

I posted previously about the Edge Seminar last July on the science of morality (see The new science of morality and Is and ought). This brought together eight researchers, including Same Harris. (Well nine actually, but Marc Hauser’s contributions have been removed – that is another story; unfortunate but significant). The videos and transcripts of the conference are available at the Edge site and are well worth viewing.

Below I have reproduced the Consensus Statement made by the scientists at the seminar. It’s a useful summary of where the science of morality currently stands – at least in the minds of eight significant scientists working in the area. Its taken from Edge 327.

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Pope Benny’s speech – graphically

Came across this simple reaction to the recent speech where Pope Bennie attributing all the ills of the world, and specifically Nazism, to atheism and secularism.

Stef Lewandowski gets his argument across with a Venn diagram.

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Thanks to Stef Lewandowski in The Pope’s speech, Venn style

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• Fury as Pope appears to equate UK atheism with Nazism (gaycat.wordpress.com)
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• The Plague of Religion

Putting the Pope in his place

I watched the twitter messages coming through this morning from participants in the London Protest the Pope Rally. Seems to have been a lot bigger than expected. Original projections were for 2000 but during the rally the police reported 15,000 and organisers were claiming “almost 20,000.”

Many of the messages indicated that participants were actually feeling proud to be British, for a change. And that the rally was a welcome breath of rationality in a sea of sycophantic media reporting during the pope’s visit.

Just picked this video up from Jerry Coyne‘s blog Why Evolution is True (see Dawkins vs. Ratzi). It’s Richard Dawkins‘ speech to the Rally at Downing Street.

This man is amazing. Not only is he a terrific writer and his academic talks spellbinding. He also turns out to be an excellent rally speaker. Brief, too the point and humorous.

He really put’s the Pope’s diversionary and hypocritical tactics into context.

Well worth watching.

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• Papal visit: Thousands protest against Pope in London – BBC Staff – BBC (richarddawkins.net)
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• Thousands protest the Pope’s visit (freethinker.co.uk)
• Catholics demand that atheists apologize for Hitler – Jerry Coyne – Why Evolution Is True (richarddawkins.net)

Popes cunning straw mannery?

Thanks to DavidD's Blog

One would have thought Pope Bennie would be on his best behaviour during his visit to the UK. After all, it’s not exactly as if the people are keen on squandering such money on an unnecessary “state” visit. Nor is his standing very high at the moment with the role he played in covering up child abuse in his church.

But he is hardly off the plane than he makes extraordinary remarks suggesting that atheism was the key factor in Nazism. Well we all know how that tactic is used in internet discussion, don’t we. Godwin’s Law states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” Mike Godwin formulated this in his sarcastic observation that, given enough time, all discussions—regardless of topic or scope—inevitably wind up being about Hitler and the Nazis.

But Bennie must be so desperate he actually started by invoking Goodwin’s law!

Of course he is well known for attempting to get a campaign going against the “evil secularism” he sees in Europe. He was helped in this by the Islamic leader King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (see Interfaith dialogue to fight against human rights).

However, perhaps Paul Kirby has a point when she suggests this silly statement is an attempt at a tactical diversion (see Calling all Pope Protestors). After all, Bennie is no fool and he has presumable worked hard, together with the UK government, to limit the embarrassment this visit will cause. Paula says:

“My conclusion is that the Nazi remarks were a deliberate attempt to deflect the anticipated protests about the scandal of the child sex abuse cover-ups in the RCC.

We know from comments made before the visit that both the Vatican and the UK govt were deeply concerned that the visit might be overshadowed by the sex abuse issue; so what could be more natural than that they would have put their heads together to try to find a way to prevent that happening? And what better method could they possibly find than to launch an attack on the likely protestors – an attack of such grotesque obscenity that we would be immediately deflected into protesting about that rather than the real issue?

It is inconceivable to me that the UK government didn’t know exactly what was going to be in the pope’s speech at Holyroodhouse this morning. Not only that, but had that Nazi comparison been made about ANY other group in British society, government officials would have been falling over one another in their rush to distance themselves from it. The fact this hasn’t happened suggests very strongly to me that this was a put-up job, an indicator of their determination to prevent the visit turning into an embarrassment to the pope (and therefore the government), as well as of the depth of their fear that it might.”

Paula is appealing to demonstrators not to be distracted. She warns “If the protests during the rest of his tour focus on his comments about Nazis and valueless secularists, rather than the issue he fears most, then he will be chortling all the way back to the Vatican on Sunday.”

And that issue is child abuse.

Image credit Pope Godwin