Epiphenom: Religion Occupies Some Kind of Half-Way House Between Fact and Opinion

This seems to explain my frustration with religion:

Children as young as 5 years seem to represent other minds as capable of containing conflicting beliefs. Additionally, around the age of 7 years, children become more likely to say that two people whose preferences conflict can both be right. This developmental shift may reflect children’s increasing experience with contradictory preferences as they begin elementary school and learn to navigate the conflicting preferences of their peers.

Go read the entire blog post!

“I Have Two Children, And At Least One of Them Is A Boy”

I’m reading Yudkowsky’s post My Bayesian Enlightenment and I thought I’d write out why (I think) his reasoning in this post is correct.

First, I’ll write the two versions of this question that he writes:

I remember (dimly, as human memories go) the first time I self-identified as a “Bayesian”. Someone had just asked a malformed version of an old probability puzzle, saying:

If I meet a mathematician on the street, and she says, “I have two children, and at least one of them is a boy,” what is the probability that they are both boys?

In the correct version of this story, the mathematician says “I have two children”, and you ask, “Is at least one a boy?”, and she answers “Yes”.

So why do they yield two different answers even though they are essentially, as in, plain-English-end-result-you-knew-what-I-meant the same? Because of the assumptions that go into each question. And you have to assume something, contrary to the oft-repeated dig “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me!!111!!one”

The first question — the mangled version — if we put it into prior probability format:

If I meet a mathematician on the street, and she says, “I have two children, and at least one of them is a boy,” what is the probability that they are both boys?

The prior probability is the statement “I have two children and at least one of them is a boy”. In this formulation, because of the “and”, the prior probability has to include at least one boy. This means there are only two options for the prior: Boy-Boy (BB) and Boy-Girl (BG). P(BB) + P(BG) = 1.00, meaning that only those two options exhausts all of our possibilities, so P(BB) = .5. The format of the question already answers itself; the answer is .5.

The second question — the actual version — if we put it into prior probability format:

In the correct version of this story, the mathematician says “I have two children”, and you ask, “Is at least one a boy?”, and she answers “Yes”.

The prior probability for this one is the statement “I have two children”. Now there are three possibilities for the prior probability: P(BB) + P(BG) + P(GG) = 1.00.

Then you come in and ask a question, adding more information to the prior probability: “Is at least one a boy?” and the mathematician says “Yes”.

Since we are adding information to the mathematician’s statement (i.e. the prior probability) we use BT:

P(BB) = .33
P(B | BB) = .???
P(B | BG) = .???
P(B | GG) = 0.0

Now we have to solve for the two remaining conditionals. Well, think about what the conditional probabilities are saying, and then realize that the conditional probabilities don’t necessarily have to add up to 1.00. So what is the probability that she would have at least one boy given that she has two boys? What is the probability that she would have at least one boy given that she has a boy and a girl?

You don’t even have to know what those probabilities are. They’re the same. And what happens when they are the same? Bayes Factor is 1. Which means that the prior probability doesn’t move. Meaning that the prior probability stays the same; P(BB | B) = .33.

The difference between the two formulations of the problem is that one has the information (the one boy) included in the prior probability and the other one does not.

The Real vs. The Merely Real

(Magnets… how do they work?)

This is one of those very annoying phenomena that comes up repeatedly in arguments between religious and non-religious people. When someone offers a scientific explanation for some phenomenon, the non-scientific person will say something to the effect of “Oh, so this means that XYZ is merely atoms colliding randomly”.

The offending word here, with all of its deliciously negative connotations, is “merely”. Or some connotative equivalent, like “nothing but” or “only”. Take this criticism that Jerry Coyne posted on his blog:

Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, whose faith in evolutionary naturalism has no limits, will continue to remind us that the high degree of accident and blind necessity in biological evolution renders the emergence of mind nothing but a fluke of nature.

The point being, you can tell when people are using this sort of sophistry by the inclusion of these weasel words, especially due to the negative connotation of it all. As a matter of fact, you can insert the weasel words into just about any sort of scientific explanation and come away with a pretty transparently ridiculous critique. The transparency is the connotation of the weasel words “merely” or “nothing but”. As though there is necessarily more to it than “merely” the scientific answer.

Rainbows are merely refracted sunlight [connotation: therefore rainbows no longer have meaning]

Magnets are nothing but electrical charges [connotation: therefore magnets no longer have any meaning]

Stars are merely balls of colliding hydrogen in space [connotation: therefore, stars no longer have any meaning]

Love is merely a chemical cocktail of oxycontin, dopamine, serotonin, and other hormones sloshing around in the brain [connotation: therefore, love no longer has any meaning]

You can go to town with this. Pick any phenomena — any at all — and insert the word “mere” into its explanation, and you can reduce this critique to its obvious absurdity. Yes, the emergence of the mind is merely due to blind evolution; because the mind is merely real instead of… not real.

Why settle for mere reality?

You can even throw the “mere” accusation back at them. Love is merely the infinite expression of god’s infinite infinity, or Jesus Christ was nothing but god’s firstborn son and took on all of our sins and merely washed them away with his blood, or… so on and so forth. Really, this whole “mere” thing really annoys the crap out of me.

Eliezer Yudkowsky points out this phenomenon in his post Explaining vs. Explaining Away

John Keats’s Lamia (1819) surely deserves some kind of award for Most Famously Annoying Poetry:

…Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow.

[...]

Apparently “the mere touch of cold philosophy”, i.e., the truth, has destroyed:

• Haunts in the air
• Gnomes in the mine
• Rainbows

[...]

The rainbow was explained. The haunts in the air, and gnomes in the mine, were explained away.

I think this is the key distinction that anti-reductionists don’t get about reductionism.

You can see this failure to get the distinction in the classic objection to reductionism:

If reductionism is correct, then even your belief in reductionism is just the mere result of the motion of molecules—why should I listen to anything you say?

The key word, in the above, is mere; a word which implies that accepting reductionism would explain away all the reasoning processes leading up to my acceptance of reductionism, the way that an optical illusion is explained away.

I think the larger valuation problem is with most people’s love affair with mystery. If something is mysterious then it’s good; it’s valuable. If something is not mysterious, then it is bad. Boring. Vanilla. Mere. God is mysterious. Therefore god is something good, something to venerate (or maybe it’s the other way around? Euthyphro?). The mind or the nature of consciousness is something good; venerable. Therefore, the mind is mysterious. It has to be, if not then it wouldn’t be valuable. Women are mysterious. Therefore, women are valuable. If women weren’t mysterious, then they wouldn’t be valuable! They would be mere women (dark arts warning: If you want to be seen as “valuable”, then you want to be seen as mysterious. Not as a “mere” or “nothing but”).

Who knows why this mystery = veneration link happened. I blame the ancient Greeks.

Anyway, I’ve written about this before. But the gist of it is that nothing is fundamentally mysterious, meaning that mystery is subjective. Mystery is a description of your own state of knowledge. So if you are venerating something because it is mysterious, this is a subtle arrogance since you are in effect worshipping your own ignorance.

Nothing is mysterious. Everything is merely real. And that’s the only response needed when someone says that XYZ phenomenon is merely atoms colliding randomly. Yes, that’s right; the phenomenon is merely real.

The Rise of Irreligiosity in the World

Of course, I already know many of the data and arguments put forth in this Edge essay. Religiosity on a national scale is correlated with high income inequality, financial/health insecurity, poor education, high birth rates, etc. Nevertheless, the authors made an argument that I never really thought of before, but its implications should have been obvious to me:

Even though liberal, pro-evolution religions are not at fault for unacceptable social policies, organized faith cannot reform itself by supporting successful secular social arrangements because these actions inadvertently suppress popular religiosity. They are caught in a classic Catch-22. And liberal churches are even less able to thrive in advanced democracies than are their more conservative counterparts, so if churches, temples and mosques become matriarchal by socio-politically liberalizing they risk secularizing themselves into further insignificance.

Liberal religionists are really in a bind. If they continue to liberalize — meaning increasing the well-being of people in “material” ways such as welfare states, social justice, etc. — then they will lead to their own undoing. Welfare states and social justice are the main sociological factors that lead to nations becoming non-religious. I don’t have any problem with that, but if they want to see their traditions continue beyond just textbooks, then they might have an issue with it.

And then their mere existence gives aid and comfort to fundamentalists. As Sam Harris has argued, the fact that liberal religionists think that faith is a virtue is all the vindication that fundamentalists need to argue their points and validate their existence.

So the liberal versions of religion have two options: Become more radical by way of denying the establishment of programs that promote the welfare state and/or social justice causes (e.g. birth control, as rampant pregnancy is one way to stabilize or increase the religious population) so that nations stay religious, or continue supporting social justice and/or things like universal healthcare which would eventually lead to their religions becoming a minority if not worse.

The Gambler’s Fallacy

So I’ve been reading some critiques of frequentism and p-value tests, and one thing that stuck out was how the “intuitive” understanding of frequentism will necessarily lead to fallacies like The Gambler’s Fallacy. This is one of those fallacies that is not weak Bayesian evidence since it violates Bayes Theorem. The Gambler’s Fallacy is thus:

The Gambler’s fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy (because its most famous example happened in a Monte Carlo Casino in 1913), and also referred to as the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process, future deviations in the opposite direction are then more likely.

Someone subscribing to the Gambler’s Fallacy would think that, since I flipped three heads in a row, the probability of me flipping a fourth heads is 6.25%… since the probability of flipping heads four times in a row is 6.25%. But no, that is incorrect. The coin doesn’t have a memory; the probability of flipping heads that fourth time is the same as flipping tails.

The problem with frequentism is that this leads people to think that probability is part of the essence of an object instead of a description of your internal state of knowledge. So someone who thinks that 50% is a property of the coin being flipped will more than likely subscribe to the Gambler’s Fallacy. The 50% property of the coin builds up some sort of probability equity if you flip too many heads or tails in a row!

On a message board I frequented about 15 years ago, a huge argument that lasted for months on end went on about airplane disasters. One faction on the board argued that since the probability of being in a plane crash is [X%], the more you fly on planes, the probability of being in a plane crash will eventually move to 100%. This makes no sense from a Bayesian point of view (what new knowledge is being input in the system on each flight that increases the probability?), but makes sense from an intuitive Frequentist point of view where probability is based on n number of trials (though an actual Frequentist who used probability regularly would not make that mistake).

The n number of trials being used to establish a fact about the object in question instead of your own subjective state of knowledge.

Thinking of things in terms of n number of trials leads one to believe that in some unspecified point in the future, the improbable thing must happen. This is the one huge critique of frequentism that Bayesians have, that frequentism is based on an infinite set, and relying on infinity abandons empiricism (we will never empirically verify the infinitieth trial).

This is different than some event that is not independent, like picking cards from a deck. In that instance, 1/52 is a fact about the object in question; in that case both your subjective knowledge and a fact about pulling a particular card from the deck are the same. But even so, something like the Monty Hall problem still makes you realize that Bayes Theorem wins the day.

Public Glory, Secret Agony

So I just read a post by April DeConick where she’s ruminating about the progress on her latest book. In it (it’s a very short post), she writes:

I really find in the fabric of that text [John's Gospel] Gnostic spirituality merging with Jewish scriptures and nascent Christianity. It is not just later Gnostic interpretation imposed on an orthodox gospel. It is there in the soul of the Gospel.

[...]

My next chapter is on Paul… I remember as a young woman really disliking Paul. What I didn’t know then is that what I disliked was not Paul but Luther’s Paul. That is when I discovered Paul the mystic. I read Albert Schweitzer’s book and then Alan Segal’s book, both on Paul the mystic. Suddenly Paul made sense to me. But he wasn’t anyone that contemporary Christians could relate to. What he was saying was way out there. Undomesticated. Wild. He was a visionary who realized union with Christ whom he saw as the manifestation of God. He developed rituals that helped democratize this experience so that all converts could similarly be united.

[...]

Of course as I am thinking about Paul the mystic, I am also wondering about Paul the Gnostic. Have we worked so hard over the centuries to domesticate Paul that we have lost touch with his Gnostic aspects too, like with the Fourth Gospel?

That got me to remembering something I thought about a long time ago, but never had any evidence for, other than in a general sense. Mystery religions in antiquity, (of which Christianity was a part of), had public stories and then private stories. Think about Scientology: They have the public story they sell on the streets with their e-meters and Dianetics books but then they have the private story they tell about Xenu and his nuking of humans in volcanoes millions of years ago. The same dichotomy was happening in antiquity. Richard Carrier gives an example with the cult of Osiris:

In fact, Plutarch attests that Osiris was believed to have died and been returned to life (literally: he uses the words anabiôsis and paliggenesis, which are very specific on this point, see my discussion in The Empty Tomb, pp. 154-55), and that in the public myths he did indeed return to earth in his resurrected body (Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 19.358b).

Although Plutarch does say that in the private teachings Osiris’ death and resurrection took place in outer space (below the orbit of the moon), after which he ascended back to the heights of heaven in his new body (not “the underworld,” as Ehrman incorrectly claims on p. 228), that is irrelevant to the mythicist’s case (or rather, it supports it, by analogy, since this is exactly what competent mythicists like Doherty say was the case for Jesus: public accounts putting the events on earth, but private “true” accounts placing it all in various levels of outer space: see my Review of Doherty). In fact the earliest Christians also believed Jesus was resurrected into outer space: he, like Osiris, ascended to heaven in his resurrection body, appearing to those below in visions, not in person (see my survey of the evidence in The Empty Tomb, pp. 105-232; the same is true of many other dying-and-rising gods, like Hercules). The notion of a risen Jesus walking around on earth is a late invention (first found in the Gospels).

That these kinds of beliefs about Osiris’ death and resurrection long predate Plutarch is established in mainstream scholarship on the cult: e.g. S.G.F. Brandon, The Saviour God: Comparative Studies in the Concept of Salvation (Greenwood 1963), pp. 17-36 and John Griffiths, The Origins of Osiris and His Cult, 2nd ed. (Brill 1980). But we hardly need point that out, because there is already zero chance that the entirety of Isis-Osiris cult had completely transformed its doctrines in imitation of Christianity already by 100 A.D. (I shouldn’t have to explain why such a claim would be all manner of stupid). Ehrman’s claim that Plutarch is making all this up because he is Platonist is likewise nonsense. Ehrman evidently didn’t check the fact that Plutarch’s essay is written to a ranking priestess of the cult, and Plutarch repeatedly says she already knows the things he is conveying and will not find any of it surprising.

It should be that Christianity shares that same pattern. You can see this a little bit in Paul, e.g. 1 Cor 3.1-3. My thought was that the gospel of Mark is the “public” story and the gospel of John (and Paul himself) are part of the tradition of the “private” story. Eventually the public story gained social currency and overshadowed the private story, and the private story fell to the Gnostics to maintain. Of course, there’s no evidence of this, so it will have to remain in the realm of speculation.

Getting ‘Em Early

(A practitioner of the dark arts)

Here’s a study that supports my recent bend on the link between cognitive science and religiosity, Exploiting children’s social instincts to boost their learning:

Young children’s instinct for group membership can be exploited to boost their learning performance. That’s according to a new study that recalls classic social psychology research conducted in the 1970s. Back then Henri Tajfel showed a darker side to this group mentality. In his “minimal group” studies, schoolboys were divided into two groups based merely on their preference for one of two artists. The arbitrary groups thus formed, the boys showed immediate bias against peers not in their group.

[...]

In one condition, the children were told that they were members of “the Blue Group” that did puzzles. Although they were alone, the children donned a blue t-shirt, sat on a blue chair, and the puzzle box had a blue sticker on it. They were further told that children in the “the Green group” do other things.

[...]

Even though they worked alone and there was no history to their group membership, the children in the Blue Group condition were fired up by their belonging to the group that does puzzles – they persisted 29 per cent longer on the puzzle than children in the “child number 3″ condition and 35 per cent longer than children not allocated to a group or individual identity.

Religious organizations know that to get a person adhering to a religion for life you have to get ‘em when they’re young. The above research suggets why this is so: because our brains are wired for groupthink. Tell a child they are a Catholic, or Hindu, or Jewish, and they’ll hold that identity longer that they rationally should.

Richard Dawkins famously argued that telling children what religion they are before they have the emotional and intellectual maturity to understand such a choice is child abuse. I’m not sure I agree with that, but certainly telling a child what religion they are against their will is taking advantage of the dark arts.