Point of Inquiry

A colleague at work recently tipped me off to the Point of Inquiry podcast, and I've listened to a bunch of episodes now. This podcast is right up my alley, taking a skeptical, freethought message to it's listeners. I've listened to a whole bunch of shows on similar subjects, but this one is my current favourite, for a few reasons:

• I've met a few of the people who have been on the show through my attendance at few workshops at the University of Oregon a few years back. (This was also a reason that I liked Bullshit! -- several of the folks from the workshop were featured there too.)


• The host, DJ Grothe, is simply fantastic. In the earlier shows he seemed to get a little excited and tended to try to speak over his guests (I've found this to be a fairly common trait for folks I've met in the Skeptic movement), but in recent shows he's been great. He's possibly the best interviewer I can remember hearing -- although his guests are generally people with whom he agrees this doesn't stop him from playing devil's advocate and asking tougher questions.


• Lauren Becker. An occasional contributor to the show, Ms. Becker seems to be some kind of expert carpenter -- continually hitting nails directly on the head. I've been reading skeptical literature for quite some time, and -- frankly -- most of it is quite similar. But Lauren provides fresh insight into some tired topics and completely new ideas in some other areas. (Well, new to me, anyway.) If the show was nothing but her five minute commentaries, it would still be well worth downloading.

The show's format is rather softball (i.e. Michael Behe hasn't been a guest yet), but it does a great job at presenting the mission of the Center For Inquiry. Highly recommended.

Consumption vs. Creation

It occurred to me the other day that a great deal of my time is spent in 'consumptive' activity: reading blogs, newspapers, books, watching TV, movies, YouTube, listening to podcasts. Apart from what I do at work, virtually none of my time is spent on creating things: the occasional blog entry and now and then some photographs -- that's about it. It seems to me that this is a little out of whack. It's a lot more fun to create than to consume, so creativity should be something that's more important to me. So, why don't I spend more time on it?

One reason, clearly, is the feeling of futility. Let's say I wanted to write or do photography as a creative outlet. I'm not the sort of person who would be content to take a great photograph and then never show it to someone -- I'd need an audience... someone to 'consume' my creative output. But I'm also the sort of person who hates to be the center of attention and don't like to draw attention to myself. So I'm a little bit stuck, it seems futile to work hard creating something, if I'm not going to share it with anyone.

Or maybe I get enough satisfaction from my creative output at work. Of course, it's not quite so personal an effort as writing or photography is, but it does challenge me.

Common Ancestor

Sometimes when you listen to people debating evolution, the evolution denier will make some statement about "I can't believe we're descended from apes", and the pro-evolution arguer will shoot back with something like this: "We aren't descended from apes, both apes and humans are descended from a common ancestor!".

I hate it when they do this.

Besides the fact that the argument from personal incredulity demands a response, at the point when a creationist expresses this sentiment, they've lapsed from reasoned argument (if they were ever there in the first place) and are lashing out with the emotional argument that lies at the root of their opposition to evolution. The right thing to do at this point would be to address that emotional issue, examine it in the light of reason to see what we can learn.

Problem is, what usually happens is that the evolution-supporter sees an opportunity to score an easy point. It's too easy -- their opponent has made a factual error and they're compelled to correct it. In the minds of these guys, there is no mistake too small to be ignored.

So, the point gets made, but it's irrelevant. Clearly, the deniers have no more interest in being descended from an ape-human common ancestor than directly from an ape. Why not go for the jugular and tell them they're descended from bacteria? Pointing out this trifling technicality doesn't advance the argument one whit.

People don't like the idea of being descended from ape-like creatures because in their minds that implies something about their nature that they find distasteful. Apes are... well... primitive.

Perhaps part of the problem is that we 'descend' from our ancestors. The sense of the word is that we are below them. Descending from apes is bad because it makes us worse than apes, and that's clearly not true. If we 'ascended' from apes, I wonder if the objection would be so strong?

Blogger's Block

I have just spent over two hours sitting here noodling with words, trying to get a very simple idea expressed in a way that I am happy with. Less than two paragraphs of text, and I just can't get it to the point where I'm very happy with it, or even agree with it.

I think maybe my writing method is taking too many lessons from my reading method, which these days is to scan a page for interesting information, reading a sentence here or there. This probably comes from my life spent reading technical manuals, where what you're doing is hunting for information, rather than trying to understand an argument or learn something deep. Anyway, my writing method has apparently now devolved to writing single sentences that sound good on their own and then trying to rearrange them into an article. Let me tell you, that doesn't work very well. Maybe I need to take a class, or maybe I need to write more, or maybe I need to read more, or maybe I need to stop writing.

Bullshit

I've been a dyed-in-the-wool Skeptic ever since I read The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. I recall being delighted and surprised to connect with someone who was willing to say out loud that UFOs, Crop Circles and all the rest of it was crap, or at least dramatically unsupported by the evidence.

One thing that's overwhelming as a skeptic is just how much junk there is out there that people believe with no evidence. Astrology, reflexology, bigfoot, feng shui, and religions of all stripe. It seems possible that most people are wrong about most things most of the time. And as a fair-minded thinker, I have to believe that this generalization probably applies to me as well. So, what are the things that I believe that are just plain wrong?

I've been watching the first season of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! and enjoying it thoroughly. One of the episodes is about a guy fighting for a smoking ban in New York restaurants, with P&T taking the position that this is bullshit, and and infringement on the rights of smokers. We have a similar ban here in Vancouver, and frankly I'm a huge fan of it because I'm really not fond of cigarette smoke.

So, I'm in the position of supporting the smoking ban because it's what I prefer, but agreeing with Penn & Teller that it's an infringement on the freedom of people who like to smoke. (There's a lot of detail about the junk science that was used to push the ban, but I won't bother you with the details.) It's a fun position for me to be in because I've caught myself in a bit of hypocrisy and I'm having trouble figuring out how to resolve it. Either,

(a) I change my tune on the smoking ban, taking the position that it's a bad thing to do to smokers, or
(b) come up with a better argument supporting the ban that doesn't put my beliefs in conflict.

Of course, my approach will be to give (b) everything that I've got, but I'm not particularly hopeful that there is a good argument to be made. If we must discard the health angle because the evidence is bad, then it's hard to see how one can justify an outright ban on behavior that's simply annoying. There's lots of annoying behavior out there. In fact, I'm not sure there's a good argument even if the data supported a health-related ban, we don't see any governments banning coal mining or cutting timber