Idiot America

Well I finally finished reading Charlie Pierce’s Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. Life got in the way of my reading schedule and in spite of how good the book was I had a hard time fitting it into my schedule.
After the first introductory chapters Pierce really got in stride and set aside much of the humor in favor of just a realistic portrayal of several different examples of America surrendering to emotion and what feels right rather than what actually was right. Whether it’s a dinosaur museum with saddles on the dinosaurs so they would be Biblically correct, a room full of terrorism experts whose opinion on Iraq was completely ignored because it didn’t fit the politics, an Island in Alaska that is literally disappearing because of global warming, a Supreme Court Justice referencing a fictitious T.V. character as evidence to support his position on torture, etc, etc, Pierce shows that somehow we’ve gotten things all screwed up. We’ve been mistaking religion for science, science for politics, and politics for entertainment.
This book really hit a nerve with me because I like to look at all issues objectively. I try to look at both sides of the issue before I take position. And even once I take a position I try stay flexible enough to change that position if more evidence arises. Lately I’ve been in a few internet and email discussions about politics and in every case the hardest people to have a rational discussion with were those that had put things in the wrong order. Just like in any conversation you have o at least agree on which language we are going to speak. You can’t have a science discussion is one party wants to use the language of religion, on the language of politics and the other the language of science. It would be just as hard if the three parties were speaking French German and Japanese. Yet time and time again you see exactly these arguments being made. Pierce effectively demonstrates the problem with this type of reasoning.
The scariest parts of the book are when experts in a certain field are called in for initial consultation and then quickly ignored when their advice conflicts with the conclusion that they had already made. The most dramatic example of this was when Al Qaeda experts we asked to provide justification for invading Iraq and they told the Pentagon that Iraq would be the wrong target. They were dismissed and their opinion was not sought again.
My biggest criticism with the book was that it did have a strong liberal slant. Much of this was unavoidable since any critique of government would be dominated by the party that is in charge. Although I do believe that the Republicans have been most guilty of forcing the evidence to fit their pre-drawn conclusion there is also plenty of blame to throw around. I can think of several examples of politicians on the other side of the aisle making similar errors in reasoning, many times on the same issues that Pierce describes. Anytime an author comes across overly sympathetic for one side and overly critical of the other he looses a little bit of credibility in my opinion. To be fair he did criticize some liberals, Jesse Jackson for instance, but the bulk of the criticism was at conservatives. I would have also liked for him to have examined the cult of the celebrety. Jenny McCarthy is a prime example. Her autism activism is seriously diverting attention away from those who really do know what they're talking about and peolpe are dying becasue of it.
I’d recommend this book to anybody who wants to better understand some of the flawed decision making that goes on in our country. Parts of it will have you laughing, parts will have you crying, and parts will have you fuming made. And sometimes all this happens in the same paragraph.

The War on Expertise

In the last decade or so there has been a carefully orchestrated attack on expertise. Little by little those who knew what they were talking about were marginalized. If a graduate degree holder gives his opinion on an issue well within the scope of his training he is called an elitist. In school board hearings we are told that “Somebody has to stand up to these experts”
Rather than cast our vote for the candidate we think is the most qualified we’ve been encouraged to vote for the candidate we’d most like to sit down and have a beer with. As if being down home and an “Ordinary Joe” is a qualification for higher office. Scientists who know what they are talking about are marginalized simple because they are experts. Doctors are accused of being tools of “big pharma” and patients are turning to modern day witch doctors and celebrities for their advice. Never before in our history has being an expert been viewed as a liability. It’s as if the jocks of the world gained power and decided that the geeks and the nerds didn’t deserve to participate because they knew too much. We used to be a meritocracy. People who worked to be expert in their fields gained higher positions and more respect. Now we label them elitist and marginalize their advice as if their expertise itself disqualifies them.
I just started reading Charlie Pierce’s Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. When we check books out form the library they give us a little receipt that is roughly 3”x5” that tell us when the book is due. I typically use the same receipt as a bookmark as I read. Victoria has taken to tearing little pieces of the receipt off and using these scraps to mark the interesting parts of the book. Up until know I’ve avoided this technique. But I’m already had to mark several passages of this book and I’m only a few chapters in. I may need to get more scraps of paper because my bookmark is getting really small already.
Pierce is really funny. But you can tell that his humor is his coping mechanism. He’s upset. He’s seriously bothered at the tremendous steps our country has been taking backwards in the last few decades. He makes you laugh with the way he describes the situation before us but the laughter is followed shortly by shame for having taken it so lightly. Because, sadly, he’s right.
In our world where everybody has a blog and everybody is an expert, nobody is. The views of Stephen Hawking are put on an equal footing with any crank on the internet who claims that the world is flat. The view of a hysterical mother are promoted on Oprah as if her discoveries have completely overturned science and the doctors who really understand the disease are only allowed to ask questions from the crowd. We treat everybody’s equal right to have an opinion as if it means that all opinions stand on equal footing. Not true at all. Some opinions deserve to die so that those based on fact and evidence can live on.
Pierce describes our awakening from this state as if describing the first glimpse of lucidity after a hangover wears off:
"This is that moment in the hangover in which you discover that your keys are in your hat, the cat is in the sink, and you attempted late the previous night to make stew out of a pot holder. Things are in the wrong place. Religion is in the box where science used to be. Politics is on the shelf where you thought you left science the previous afternoon. Entertainment seems to have been knocked over and spilled on everything. " (p.30)
Pardon my pessimism, but I think his description is a bit premature. I feel like most of America is still hung-over and quite a few are still enjoying the party and not even thinking about the consequences yet. I’ll give a complete review when I’ve read the whole book. So far Idiot America has been a hilarious yet humbling read.

Peace Day

I read this book a few years ago. I can't say I enjoyed it, it was actually very painful to read, but I felt I had to read it. While I was in Japan I had an old man basically ask me for forgiveness on behalf of America. He had killed Americans during the war and even saw the bomb go off over Hiroshima from a boat in the harbor. I was the first American he had seen in decades. We can post hoc justify Truman's decision but that does not diminish the horror that it caused.
Today is the 64th anniversary of the day we bombed Hiroshima. I think we to make sure that no one ever has to experience this horror again.
The Japanese call today Peace Day. Perhaps we should start doing the same.

Ender's Game: a Review

As a family we just finished reading “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card. I was very apprehensive about reading it with the kids because of the quite serious theme, especially near the end. Not surprisingly Rachel has been having a very hard time with it. I remember being disturbed by the book when I first read it in High School. I shared my concerns with my father who encouraged me to continue on and read “Speaker for the Dead”. The sequel does redeem many of the seriously unethical aspects of the first book, but on its own I cannot recommend that anybody read “Ender’s Game”.
Lately I’ve been reading several book s on psychology, decision making, ethics and philosophy. It’s with this extra education that I was even more disgusted by “Ender’s Game”. If you haven’t read the book and don’t want any spoilers, stop reading now.
In the first Chapter the government has intentionally bred a child to be the commander of the next army. They even violated local laws in order to allow the child to be born. Not only did this child have little to no choice about his future, this is just the tip of the iceberg for the ends-justifies-the-means mentality that influences every single action of the government as it pertains to Ender.
At an age when he can still show you how old he is with his fingers Ender is intentionally put into situations where he is forced to defend himself. Eventually he even is forced to kill. He is also praised for not stopping when the threat is simply gone, but to continue until he completely destroys his enemy. In the most brutal scene he continues to attack a fellow student after he is knocked unconscious. As if allowing this wasn’t unethical enough Ender’s handlers told him that his victims were merely transferred and concealed the true horror of his actions from him.
All this was foreshadowing for the last few chapters. There Ender is deceived again, this time into destroying an entire species. Again the full scope of his actions was held from him. He was told that the war he was fighting was just a game. They encouraged him to be unethical and to not play by any rules. By his own admission he cheated. He just wanted to end the game. They weren’t real. He was encouraged to believe that the enemy was teachers and that’s the only game he was trying to win. Had he known the full scope of his actions he likely would have responded differently.
The really disturbing part of the last chapters came when you realize that the war was over before he had attacked. The buggers were trying to apologize for their mistaken invasion but simply didn’t know how to communicate with us. Victoria and I even speculated that the second attack, which was a complete victory for the humans, was even a peace offering to make them feel victorious and not pursue the issue any further. Had they not encouraged totally destruction as the only definition of victory there would have been no further conflict.
So why am I getting so upset about this? It’s only fiction, right? Unfortunately we live in a world where far too many people believe that once you’ve defined and enemy the only thing left is too destroy them. We live in a world were decent people will succumb to situational evil and commit unspeakable atrocities. We’ve sacrificed American values and liberty in the name of victory and didn’t even give diplomacy a fair chance. Our leaders define political opinions as if there were only patriots and terrorists and nothing in between. We post hoc justify all of this as if the actions themselves are proof of their efficacy. Just because we destroyed a counties ability to wage war doesn’t prove that they were planning an attack. We have manipulated congress, the public and the media with false information to support going to war. Etc. etc. etc. The parallels from this book are far too many for me to simply dismiss it as fiction.
Card has had numerous calls from Hollywood to turn this book into a movie. I confess that I think the training at the battle school would make for good action scenes. I am just very concerned that those scenes would be the only take-away and the overwhelming horror of his childhood would be lost.
We’re going to read “Speaker for the Dead” next. It’s a much better book for exactly the opposite reasons that I disliked “Ender’s Game”. Ender is allowed to think. He doesn’t rush to judgment. He has a conscience and diplomacy is encouraged. But most of all he understands what he is doing and why. It makes him a much better leader and a better human being. I think Rachel will be able to sleep a little better once we finish it.

Diet Drinks

Earlier this week Aaron and I went to QT after scouts. We each got a fountain drink. Aaron asked me,
“What’s the deal with diet drinks?”
I got a little bit of a chuckle out of the question and told him that he needed to ask his mother that same question when she gets home. I then gave him a brief description of what her response would be. So last night we were walking around Ikea and Aaron pops the same question on Victoria,
“What’s the deal with diet drinks?”
Victoria went on complete autopilot and pulled out her prepared statement on why she dislikes diet drinks and read every point to Aaron, line by line. I’ve heard her diatribe about diet drinks several time. She didn’t miss a beat and hit every major point that I told Aaron she’d hit. At this point Aaron and I are just rolling and Victoria is just looking around confused, wondering what is so funny. We confessed that the previous few minutes were planned ahead of time and that she had played her part better than if we had handed her a script.
Last year I was in an online discussion and the subject came up that “the Mormon Church controls the Boy Scouts of America”. Like Victoria, and probably everybody else, I too have a cache of prepared diatribes that I pull out whenever certain subjects come up. I too went on autopilot and proceeded to state my reasons, and evidence that the Mormon Church does not control the Boy Scouts of America. I’d given the speech a few times before so I thought I knew what I was talking about. Over the course of the discussion it was shown that a couple of my facts were out of date. Specifically, I had made the claim that Thomas S. Monson was the only LDS member of the leadership committee of BSA. I was shown that although it used to be true there was at least one other member of the committee who was LDS. My prepared speech was out of date. The gist of it was still correct and I still stand by my initial claim, but my supporting details need to be updated. So I did a little more research to see what else had changed.
For the record I agree with Victoria’s assessment of diet drinks and I don’t know if any of her supporting facts have changed in the last few years. Both of us routinely just order ice water with a little bit of lime rather than ingest the artificial sweeteners in most diet drinks.
My only point in sharing these two stories is that they have given me pause for reflection. How many prepared speeches do we have cached away ready to give at a moment's notice? I’m sure we all have quite a few. Are the facts up to date? When was the last time you verified them? Have you given the issue an honest re-evaluation or are you still basing your opinions on the way things were when you first formed that opinion? Perhaps it’s time to pull out those speeches and give them a second look. If, after careful evaluation, you still feel the same and the facts still support your position, Great! If, on the other hand, things have changed the other direction does that effect your opinion on the issue? I just think that it’s healthy to periodically question our beliefs, especially those that we cherish the most.

Victoria is dead right about diet drinks. Most of them are rather nasty and unpalatable. I’ve become a little more tolerant of Sprite Zero lately but I still prefer just ice water with a little bit of lime. If you want to really have some fun with Victoria start talking about how you really love dark meat chicken. Incidentally I agree with her on that one too. She’s just got a better diatribe than I do.

Relative Dangers

A few weeks ago we got an email at work from the hive-overmind. The email told us that we needed to get rid of all plants that we might have in our cubes. The reasoning they gave for it was that “plants collect dust and can release spores into the air which may be harmful to people.” No sooner had I read that, I heard a coworker scream “Well yeah but they also collect CO2 and release oxygen which can be helpful to people!” I got a kick out of his response, especially since I’m the one labeled as the “tree-hugger”.
The email got me thinking about a much larger issue. How often do we avoid something because of the potential negative effects without properly weighing the potential benefits? And how often do we not consider the risks of what we would do instead?
We’ve heard it before with the controversy over airbags and children. Many group vilified airbags for a few deaths without considering the overwhelming benefit that airbags offer. One of my kids asked me a few years ago “Why do they put things in cars that kill kids?” He was talking about airbags. I had to explain that airbags are a safety device and in the overwhelming majority of cases they save kids lives.
Last week I was invited to go out to lunch with some co-workers. I respectfully declined since I wanted to get my lunchtime walk in. He told me that I was going to get killed walking along the roads around the office. He was concerned about the potential dangers of the traffic and ignoring the benefits of a 3 mile walk every lunch hour. Sure walking on the sidewalk can be dangerous but so can going out to lunch and eating a high fat lunch and then sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day.
I frequently get criticism for going rock climbing. I like to point out that, assuming everything is done correctly, the drive up and back is probably more dangerous than anything I would do on the rock.
I guess I'm just concerend that some really good ideas might be tossed aside for some relatively minor risks without consdiering the risks of what we would use to replace them. I can think of several hot button political issues that we should also exercise thsi same type of anaylisis.

Gambler's Fallacy.

After reading the Drunkard’s Walk I became even more aware of some of the logical fallacies that people use to support their beliefs and opinions. Last weekend I had a conversation with a few friends and I was surprised that three of them were all guilty of the gambler’s fallacy. The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that after a string of one type of result you become “due” for the other. It’s called the gambler’s fallacy because many believe that after a string of bad luck the odds start have to tip in their favor soon. In reality the previous events are completely independent of the next event. If I flip a coin the odds that it will be head is 1 chance in 2. Now suppose I have flipped 5 heads in a row already, does the coin know somehow “know” that it’s supposed to not be 1 in chance in 2 of falling heads but somehow it will be less likely? This is the most basic example, but I’ve heard highly educated people who should otherwise have a firmer grasp of statistics than the average gambler still make this same error in logic. Sometimes its with a sports player who hasn’t been performing as well as he should. Fans believe that he should be coming “due” for some good luck.
The conversation over the weekend focused around hurricanes. Many of us had gone to Florida and the gulf to help rebuild after the 2004 and 2005 seasons. They expressed the feeling that since the last few years showed less than average hurricane activity that we were “due” for a bad season. Just like the coin has no record of how the previous coin flips turned out the weather doesn’t keep track of the previous year’s hurricane counts. Now I support their position that we should be prepared to go down and assist again if those folks should need it. I just don’t agree with the logic that they used to get to that conclusion.

Creatures of Habit

So this morning as I walked to the door of our office building there was another employee waiting there. Our building has an electronic card reader and then about a foot above that is a button that opens doors. She was waiting outside because she didn’t think her card was being read. I walked past her and simply opened the door for her. She was amazed that my card worked and hers didn’t. Now here’s the catch. I hadn’t scanned my card. Apparently the card reader was working just fine but the handicapped door opener button wasn’t working. She had grown so used to her pattern of holding the card in her hand an hitting the button that when the door didn’t open she thought she was locked out, even though she could have just walked up to the door an pulled it open just like I did. Later on I noticed that a crew was out to repair the door, which was knocked out by the lightning last night.
I’ve heard similar stories of people think they were locked out of their cars just because the battery was dead on their remote. The event got me wondering how many times I’ve done similar things.

God's Problem

Bart Ehrman is a biblical textural researcher. He makes a living researching the original texts that we have used to compile the Bible in its current form. I’ve read many of his books. Perhaps his best is Misquoting Jesus, which I reviewed on this blog a few years ago. Ehrman quite convincingly showed that many of the doctrines that some Christian’s cling to are mistranslations and sometimes not even in the original texts. The book reads not as a direct criticism of faith in general but as a caution not to get too hung up on the wording of a certain passage that may have been drastically different or even non-existent in the original texts. I really enjoyed this book. Ehrman was in his element and speaking from his wealth of experience studying the original texts of the Bible, particularly the New Testament.

In the last few years, thanks to Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code and the discovery and preservation of the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, Ehrman has written other popular books that focused again on the original texts of the New Testament. I also enjoyed both of these books. They were right up Ehrman alley. In his book about the DaVinci Code he was able to shed light on what the texts actually claimed and not just how Dan Brown distorted them to tell his story. Other rebuttals of The DaVinci Code fell flat in comparison to Ehrman’s book. The others just came across as angry Christian apologetics rather than well thought out logical responses.

Ehrman was also one of the best choices to write a book about the Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot since he was active on the team that studied and translated the recently recovered codex. I found his detailed personal account of what it took to translate and preserve this codex absolutely fascinating.

So with his history of very enjoyable books I was somewhat disappointed with God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer. Here Ehrman strays from strictly examining the texts and reporting what they say or don’t say. The book reads as a scholar who used to have faith but lost it. The cathartic story of his loss of faith is moving, but it’s a vastly different theme than his previous books. And in the long run I just didn’t care. It doesn’t matter to me if you are a man of faith or an atheist. You’re personal response to the information you convey should be irrelevant to the facts. Although I sympathize, his continual personal stories grew more than a little tiring. I felt that most of the book was an explanation to his family about why he no longer considers himself a Christian.

The rest of the book goes into graphic detail about how nasty, selfish and down right mean the God of the Old Testament appears in the texts. Although I agree with most of the analyses and statements he made I just didn’t feel like he was saying much, if anything, new. There are plenty of recent books that handle just this topic. Perhaps if I had read God’s Problem before I’d read The God Delusion or The End of Faith I would have a different opinion. Ehrman is better qualified to criticize than either Dawkins or Harris. Besides these two that I have read there are several others including the very mean spirited God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens.

In this flood of what can fairly be called evangelical atheist books God’s Problem just seems to be needless repetition. I look forward to reading future Ehrman books as long as he focuses on what he does best and doesn’t get to preachy.

The Drunkard's Walk

My poor blog has been neglected lately. Not because I haven’t had any good ideas to post about, but simply because I haven’t had the time to slow down long enough to type them up. I’ll get things back on track with a few book reviews.
Humans have what seems to be a pathological inability to comprehend statistics. We tend to think things are freak occurrences but, when you analyze the probability we see that they are actually quite ordinary. We interpret it as some kind of an omen when a stain on the wall of the burn pattern in a piece of French toast appears to vaguely look like you deity of choice. Yet how many pieces of toast have you had that didn’t look like that and why do you think that they would choose this way to manifest themselves?
In The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives Leonard Mlodinow explores exactly these issues. The book starts out with a very intriguing history of the study of statistics. If for this history alone the book would have been well worth the read. But Mlodinow makes the history much deeper by exploring the many ways in which we misunderstand statistics and what it means for something to be truly random.
I’ll share a short story form the book that illustrates how humans are very poor judges of what it means to be random. Several years ago when Apple first came out with their iPod they had a cool feature that would randomly pick the next song rather than play the list in order. Neat huh? Well they started to get complaints. Sometimes the feature would play songs from the same artist consecutively. And sometimes they would repeat the same song with only a song or two between playing. Occasionally it would even play the same song back to back. This lead people to believe that their randomizer function wasn’t working properly. After a bunch of complaints they changed the algorithms. They’ve inserted code that won’t allow the player to play songs from the same artist consecutively. It also makes sure that the same song is not replayed for quite some time. What I find really funny about this whole process is that in order to make the order of the songs seem more random they actually had to make it significantly less random. Apple had to go out of their way to create a pattern that was NOT truly random because humans thought that the truly random shuffler was flawed.
This is just one example of the many ways that we fail to grasp statistics and how randomness affects our lives. I found this book very entertaining and eye opening.