There Are Four Lights

Check out my post over at Skeptic North for all my new holiday art in one place!

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Prints Available

Prints Available

In 2009, I sent this little tweet, which enjoyed many RTs (including one from @BadAstronomer).

The next year, I decided to transform the idea into manga form. Again, it was blogged by the lovely Bad Astronomer. The drawing has appeared in a few of my talks as well.

This year, I was thrilled to find out that my creation jumped from cyberspace to meatspace! The Chicago Skeptics celebrated Carl Sagan Day by eating apple pie and drinking Cosmos! Amazing! I’m glad they joined the fine Mayhew tradition!

If we remember we can take care of each better than we do, that we can make the world a better place for everyone, Jack lives on.

The Honourable Jack Layton was leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a title he earned in a historic win for the NDP, last spring. But to Canadians everywhere, he was Jack–that a politician was known by first name basis is evidence that his down to earth character was clear to everyone, regardless of their political affiliation.

What made Jack stand out in politics was his dedication and optimism. The NDP campaigned on hope and a focus on working together, free from dirty tactics and political cynicism. He inspired young Canadians, like myself, that we can work to make the world a better place, fight with unshakable passion against injustice and cruelty, while treating each other—even our opponents—with decency and respect.

Today we lost a champion of social justice, defender and friend of the common Canadian; a deeply kind man who never backed down from fighting for what’s right, determined to make a difference. “Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.”

Remember Jack.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

Amazing Meeting? Spock is not impressed with Skeptics in the Tub.

Far too often, it seems, our thinking becomes caught in a loop of ideology and abstract thinking. When it comes to many issues, I see us forgetting about real-world, practical solutions because of the emotional impact that larger ideas and beliefs have on us. In an interview with Canada’s George Stroumboulopoulos (aka Strombo), author and professor of animal sciences, Temple Grandin touched on this issue which she calls “abstractification”.

I’m not into ideology and theory…Things have gotten to far away from reality–I call it abstractification. We need to be figuring out how to solve practical problems. In the ’50s, in my country, the Republicans built the interstate highway systems and the Democrates went to the moon.

As a woman with autism, Grandin explains she has difficulty thinking in abstract terms; her brain deals in pictures, a more literal style of thinking. What makes her happy is when something she does has a real impact on making the world a better place—-again, in a practical, literal sense. As a skeptic, I find it very important to base our solutions on evidence and apply critical thinking to them, instead of relying on what “feels right”.

Now, let me assure you…as a writer and artist, I’m fully aware of the importance and power of ideas, words, symbolism, and metaphors. In a few days, I’ll be attending The Amaz!ng Meeting where I’ll be presenting my talk on “Secular Storytelling”, which focuses on taking advantage of the powerful influence storytelling can have on us and it’s ability to inspire us into both action and a new manner of thinking, in order to promote skepticism and secular humanism. But I’m concerned that too often, more literal, practical thinking is being overshadowed by ideology and abstractification. And so, I’d just like to offer a few tiny examples of how we might do some more practical problem solving, when it comes to the issue of women in skepticism, in addition to the slightly more abstract action of speaking, writing, and debating issues in general.

One practical action has already been implemented at this year’s TAM; there seems to have been a conscious effort to invite more women speakers to conferences. One of the biggest and most easily remedied problems—-not just at skeptic conferences, but society in general—-is simply exposing everyone to more women. As writer, I often speak about the benefits of more depictions of female characters in comics, tv, and movies which demonstrate that women are just people. Think of the wide variety of male characters we’re exposed to and then the very narrow options for female characters. For this reason, I’d like to mention that I don’t want to see more women at skeptic conferences just talking about women’s issues—-we need to see more women talking about the same variety of topics that our male counterparts do, just like this year’s TAM lineup offers.

When it comes to the issue of women attendees, however, the issue has become focused on the problem of some women feeling uncomfortable or objectified by advances and flirting from male attendees. First of all, let me assure you that this is not a problem confined to skeptic, atheist, and freethought groups; I’ve been to a wide variety of conferences—-from the low to mid level anime and comic book conventions to the high-end, as classy as it gets, TED conferences. No matter what the topic, venue, or budget, when you gather a group of people in a social setting, you will end up with the problem of unwanted sexual advances or an unbalanced ratio of men/women attendees. This is an issue about conferences and meetup groups in general, rather than skepticism specifically.

One factor in this issue, however, is the practical problem that there seems to be a lack of social spaces for skeptics and humanists to hookup with other like minded people. Something which could be considered is having events set aside specifically for singles. This is a pretty common-place idea at other venues and in other communities, which have singles-only evening events as part of a conference’s program, or host meetups designated for single-and-looking members. If these spaces were available, there would a safe place for flirtation among attendees and might reduce the amount of this behaviour in settings where everyone simply wants to partake in causal socializing or intellectual debate without being hit on.

When the situation does arise where you’re feeling uncomfortable, I’d like to suggest that we consider doing a bit more speaking up, at the time. It may be that the people around you aren’t aware that they’re making you feel bad. We can be too quick to cynically believe our feelings will be misunderstood or ignored. I’m sure there are plenty of situations where we can politely express that we’d just like to be treated like everyone else and aren’t interested in flirtation—-not simply to say this in general but directly to those who are demonstrating that unwanted behaviour, when they’re doing it. Personally, I would do this before bringing up the topic in a more general forum because of the potential for a very practical result; that specific person might actually recognize their unwanted behaviour and make a real change in how they interact with others. Speaking or writing in a public forum to men in general has the drawback that many men may think that their own behaviour has never been a problem—-these gals are referring to other guys, not me! There are certainly going to be times where this won’t work, or is appropriate, but I think it’s cynical not to believe that most decent people will be understanding, as long as you’re nice about it.

And speaking of being nice…the last practical idea I’d like mention is one that has been mentioned before and applies to most any issue; remembering to not be a dick. This applies to everyone—-even you—-in pretty much every sitution. The “Don’t be a Dick” rule isn’t just about style; it’s a manner of communicating which has a real use—-not being a dick will never make things worse. But keeping to this motto is a lot harder than it sounds. It’s easy to be nice on matters which we aren’t emotionally invested in and towards topics which aren’t particularity important to us. Not being a dick doesn’t mean being a push-over or an apologetic. It means making a conscious effort to ensure that your words are going to be received in a manner which makes it most likely that your opponents may find them convincing.

As skeptics, we all know that the act of telling someone they’re wrong often makes them more deeply convinced they are right (my favourite book on the subject is, of course, “Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me” by TAM9 speaker, Carol Tavris). This is exacerbated by aggressive language, personal attacks, and general dick-ish behaviour. What I’ve seen in the discussions about women in skepticism is many debates quickly escalating into arguments blown out of proportion. One side will be called whinny, privileged, man-hating crybabies who need to shut the fuck up, while the other is called rich, white, fucking privileged, rape-apologetics who are an embarrassment to scientists everywhere. There is nothing helpful about this kind of debate. The practical result is only to make those who already agree with you more passionate, those who disagree more confident of their convictions, and everyone in the middle turn away and push the entire topic away from their interest completely.

What else can we do, in addition to debate and consciousness raising, that will have a practical benefit to the issue?

Here’s an nice example of creating a provocative, flashy title for your science article in order to draw readers; “Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it” – New Scientist. Yea, sure, fine…call it a ‘magic trick’, whatev~ But the misleading part is the claim that “reality is what you make it”.

This relates a bit to my last post where I discussed the problems in believing that science is just another narrative among many that you can “choose” to believe. People who subscribe to that view will jump all over this article and add it to their repertoire of examples where quantum mechanics legitimizes the position that whatever you choose to believe becomes real through the act of believe it alone; “reality is what you make it”.

But this is misleading. Quantum physics doesn’t support the position of “anything goes”. In fact, quantum physics makes extremely accurate predictions about the quantum world. This means that there are “rules” about how reality is working—-not that reality works in whatever way you choose it to. The spookiness of quantum physics makes it easy to exploit people’s misunderstanding of it. Typically, this is done to prop up unsupported beliefs using the legitimacy of science, like quantum physics, in order to lend a sense of  credibility to them.

A commonly used misunderstanding is that the term “observer” means a human or intelligence. It’s not the person’s consciousness or thoughts which effect the outcomes of the measurement, it’s the act of measurement itself—-it’s the fact that something is interacting with it. I find it a bit easier to think about it like this: When we look at big things (measure it) we’re observing it because light (photons) are hitting them and bouncing back into our eyeball holes. Because the objects are big, the photons hitting them don’t have much of an effect…a little photon bouncing of a chair isn’t going to going to knock it over; like bouncing a billiard ball at building isn’t going to effect the building. But if you want to measure particles, you have to bounce other particles off of them. Sorta like bouncing a billiard ball off another billiard ball. Then, add in the spooky, counter-intuitive fact that particles don’t actually have a fixed position ‘n stuff and you get that brain-melting feeling of confusion and throw your Brian Greene book across the room~aaaaaaagh!

My point is, there’s a lot I don’t know about quantum mechanics and plenty that I’m wrong about (most likely, most of the previous paragraph!). What I’m confident I’m not wrong about is that we can’t draw the conclusion from quantum experiments that reality is what you make it. At some point, there are ‘rules’ the universe follows. You can’t have a rule that says ‘there are no rules’.

Everything I say is a lie –Captain Kirk

There are no magic tricks in quantum mechanics that give you a loop hole for whatever belief you have which doesn’t conform to reality. The universe operates independent of our desires.

The following video contains the answers of Miss America contestants when asked if evolution should be taught in class rooms. Make all the jokes you want about the stereotype regarding how intelligent a beauty pageant contestant is (I was in a beauty pageant when I was in high school…so…uh…yea~), but their answers are pretty typical of what you’d get if you asked anyone from the general public. The problem isn’t just a lack of understanding of what a scientific theory is. There’s an larger problem at work here; the idea that knowledge is relative and that science is just another “story” among the many narratives we choose to tell ourselves.

A common view expressed by the contestants is that “both sides of the story” should be taught. One problem with this view is it seems there is the assumption that “creationism” means the Christian story of how life began. If you’re going to teach creation stories in school, then you should be teaching children all of the creation stories—-not just the Christian one. But the bigger problem is placing a scientific theory on the same level as a culture’s mythology.

It’s obvious that there’s a common misunderstanding of the term “theory” when used in the scientific context. Yes, evolution is a theory, but it’s the same kind of theory as the theory of gravity, germ theory, and the theory of relativity. Scientific theories are a collection of related facts which make testable predictions about the world. Gravity will still pull you to the ground if you step out your second story window regardless of your worldview. Germs will still exist and cause disease despite your disbelief in them and your GPS will guide you to your destination thanks to relativity whether or not you understand the theory. These are not “stories” or world views. These are facts about the world.

The same is true of evolution. Evolution is not another creation myth, therefore legitimizing the teaching of other creation myths. Firstly, evolution does not tell us how life began (creation). A hint is right in the title of Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species (By Means of Natural Selection). See that? It’s about the origin of species, not the origin of life. Evolution tells us about species—-their origin and their extinction. Evolution doesn’t deal with how life began, only with the the fact that different varieties of it have lived and died throughout history, and continue to do so. This is not a creation story at all—-it is a set of facts based on observations of the real world.

This all comes from the more general assertion that science is simply another narrative—-just another worldview that you can choose for yourself. This position has the advantage of sounding nice; it sounds tolerant and fair. But it’s an intellectually dishonest position with only one purpose; to avoid the discomfort of being wrong. If you say everyone is right, then no one (and most conveniently, you) can never be wrong. The argument that mythologies and beliefs are just as legitimately true as scientific facts is not presented in an intellectually honest manner. That is to say, when it’s brought up in debate it’s not being used to honestly critique the limits of knowledge but rather is only a strategy tolevel the playing field. The only condition in which mythologies and belief system won’t collapse is if you take away the weight of evidence. They require biased and fallacious thinking in order to stay intact. You have to destroy the concept of knowing and place yourself in a position where anything anyone makes up is true. You have to bring down science to the level of “just another story” because myths and mystical thinking never survive the attempt to bring them up to the standards of science.

You wouldn’t teach flat-earth views in geology, the geocentric model in astronomy, or holocaust denial in history. You realize how ridiculous that would be because the intellectually honest part of you understands that there are things which can be shown to be unambiguously false. When your personal belief clashes with scientific fact, it means your story doesn’t line up with reality.

All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch. –Isaac Asimov