The Shape of State and Soul

by Steve Neumann

I believe that this educational process has two sides — one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following.

— John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed

Bloggers Libby Anne and Dan Fincke have been doing a very interesting weekly roundup over at Patheos called Forward Thinking: A Values Development Project, and this week’s topic is: What is the purpose of public education?

In writing my RS post for last week, I came across an article by John Tierney critiquing the reigning “corporate education reform” paradigm in American public education. His essay was geared more towards the merits and demerits of specific educational policies; but I’d like to explore a more meta-view of the nature and role of education in general.

I. Socrates on the Shape of State and Soul

Plato presents us with an extensive, contentious and, at times, perplexing treatment of the ideal city-state in his Republic. Plato has Socrates engage in a general discussion of justice, and whether or not it’s always conducive to one’s happiness (i.e., eudaimonia) to live justly rather than unjustly; and he also explores whether or not a just city is always happier than an unjust one. But what interests me most is his taxonomy of the human soul, in which he distinguishes the parts of reason, spirit, and appetite. He further distinguishes between people ruled by reason, spirit, or appetite. The idea of justice within the soul (i.e., the personality) translates into the just ordering of these various parts, with the rational, wisdom-loving part directing the aims of all the other potentially unruly parts.

So if I were to distill Plato’s rambling tome into a single concept (which is impossible, really; but humor me) for our purposes, it would be this: the goal of public education is to achieve a unity across society by creating a unity within the individual. A good person, a “virtuous” person, makes herself into a unity; and a city is also made good or virtuous by being made into a unity. At the societal level, achieving a unity would include having each citizen achieve optimum performance in their assigned function (while at the same time accepting this assigned role); at the individual level, each citizen would achieve maximal contentment in their assigned role: for example, those charged with animal husbandry would find their maximal fulfilment in that work, the cobbler in his, the farmer in his, and so forth. I say “assigned” roles because Plato had some very definite ideas about who should do what and why.

Plato also introduces his famous allegory of the cave in the Republic. In the interest of concision, let’s say that the most salient point of this allegory is that the goal of education is to turn the citizens of the city-state toward the best desires. What are the best desires? Well, you have to ask the philosophers for that. But let’s agree with Plato, for the sake of argument, that the philosophers do know what the best desires are, and how to acquire them. In fairness to Plato, he does show that the philosopher-class would undergo a rigorous intellectual and physical education themselves, presumably making them uniquely adept at identifying and communicating the nature of the best desires.

But I don’t intend to discuss the pros and cons of the means to these ends. That would involve voluminous footnotes to the “footnotes to Plato.” And clearly, in our modern society, there isn’t widespread agreement on what the best desires are. In this post, I'd like to focus instead on what seems to me to be the biggest issue: the fact that public education embodies the difficulty of balancing Public Value and Private Value.

II. Public Value vs. Private Value

There seems to me to be two (potentially conflicting) goals of modern education: one whose end is some repertoire of skills or body of knowledge designed to make the individual a productive member of society (for economic and/or cultural value); another one whose end is the cultivation of some innate talent or talents for the benefit of the flourishing (eudaimonia) of the individual herself. In other words, Public Value versus Private Value. I think the Public Value aspect of education is unambiguous and uncontroversial, and is the dominant paradigm: society has a vested interest in producing economically and culturally productive individuals who are also moral. But I think the more interesting question is what constitutes Private Value.

One of the major things we moderns share with Plato is the claim that human beings are not blank slates. Of course, Plato’s idea of human nature is much different than our current naturalistic take on it. But the reasons for our nature being the way it is are really irrelevant to our discussion here. It suffices to point out that there is a repository of shared behaviors that most human beings display to varying degrees. It’s this range of behaviors that enables us to live together in relative harmony under our current social system; that is, our formal criminal justice system as well as our informal system of reward and punishment that’s played out in innumerable interpersonal interactions every day. We rely on the relatively consistent predictability of our shared human nature. It’s arguably the linchpin of civil society.

However, even though we all share a common human nature, there is still a lot of room for individuality, and it’s this uniqueness that presents the biggest problem for those who focus on the Private Value of education. While the American Declaration of Independence states that all human beings are created equal, and that this is a self-evident truth, I think it’s painfully obvious that this is false. Whether or not human beings are deserving of equal rights is a different matter, and not one I want to discuss here. I’m more concerned with the Private Value aspect of public education, so I want to discuss the nature of talent in light of this.

III. On Reaching the T.O.P.

I said above that one goal of education is to effect the flourishing (eudaimonia) of the individual. In connection with this, we can cite John Rawls’ Aristotelian principle, which says that, other things being equal, individuals enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate and trained abilities); and this enjoyment increases the more this capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity. Though Rawls combines both innate and trained abilities in his description of realized capacities, I think they actually deserve to be separated, owing to their distinct attributes, and because I think there is a pervasive and significant confusion in our society about the differences between skills, knowledge and talent.

Rawls does, however, distinguish between “innate” and “trained” abilities. For my purposes, I define these terms in a manner similar to the way in which they’re outlined in the management development book First, Break All the Rules, where skills are trained (i.e., acquired) conceptual and physical abilities; knowledge is the accumulated information and experience that gets stored in memory; and talent is “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied.” Here’s a little more from author and business consultant Marcus Buckingham:

Your talents, they say, are the behaviors you find yourself doing often. You have a mental filter that sifts through your world, forcing you to pay attention to some stimuli, while others slip past you, unnoticed. Your instinctive ability to remember names, rather than just faces, is a talent. Your need to alphabetize your spice rack and color code your wardrobe is a talent. So is your love of crossword puzzles, or your fascination with risk, or your impatience. Any recurring patterns of behavior that can be productively applied are talents.

In other words, talents can’t be taught; they are the result of the confluence of genetic and experiential factors. However, they can be amplified; and this amplification involves the proper combination and arrangement of one’s skills and knowledge. Or, in Plato-speak, the just or judicious ordering of these aspects — and that’s where education comes in. But more on that in a bit. I would just clarify that the productive application of one’s recurring patterns of thought and behavior extends to one’s eudaimonistic project as well, and not just to one’s deposit into the account of Public Value.

Talents are the raw materials one uses to build one’s eudaimonistic project. They can be amplified by supplementing them with complementary acquired skills and accumulated knowledge, and their harmonious arrangement is the essence of this project. This is what I think of as, following Plato, achieving a “unity” within the individual soul: the rational harnessing of as many talents, properly construed, as possible, which should lead to the achievement of happiness (eudaimonia) for the individual. But how is such a project possible? Without getting into the details of specific educational theories or curricula — since I said I want to explore a meta-view of the topic of public education — we can employ a handy little acronym: T.O.P., which stands for Talent, Opportunity and Practice: one needs to identify one’s raw Talents; have the Opportunity to Practice or refine them; and then also have a chance to put them into Practice.

Though an unusually introspective but objective person may be able to identify her innate talents through a process of rational reflection, or discover them haphazardly in the process of living her life, I think for most people the identification or discovery of one’s talents, and their potential applications, requires direct education. I say “direct” education because I want to imply the need for a “teacher” of some sort, as opposed to the education one gets from the School of Hard Knocks, as they say.

The notion of Opportunity is really more of a political issue than an educational one, because it involves more of the specific laws (or lack of laws) prevalent in one’s society. And even though I’m concerned in this post with education, it’s Opportunity that is probably the most important one: what good is cultivating one’s talents if one never gets the opportunity to practice or exercise them?

The notion of Practice, while it involves the notion of Opportunity, is more properly an educational issue: not only does a teacher educate one about one’s talents, she also directs the practice of those talents, determining which practices are the most valuable. Additionally, a good teacher can also expand one’s horizons to include applications for one’s talents that one might not have imagined were possible. It’s this stretching of one’s abilities that I think speaks to Rawls’ claim that an increased complexity contributes to the enjoyment of one’s eudaimonistic project.

One of the goals, and possibly the main goal, of an individual’s eudaimonistic project is to find meaningful work. One’s work is both the satisfaction of one’s basic needs (i.e., food, clothing, shelter, etc.) and the potential realization of one’s innate and trained capacities. And if one can find meaningful work, then one can also simultaneously satisfy the twin demands of Public Value and Private Value.

In contrast to the still relatively primitive economy of Plato’s time, our modern economy possesses a breadth and depth that is capable of accommodating a diverse array of amplified talents. And, also in contrast to Plato’s time, the route to maximal happiness for the individual needn’t involve resigning oneself to one’s assigned role. But the realization of this state of being would most likely fall to our educators, whomever they may be.

IV. Who Are Our Educators?

Plato felt that the philosophers, being properly educated themselves, would be the best educators, because they know what is good for humanity, knowing what Goodness itself is. Consequently, they would turn the citizens toward the best desires, which, for Plato, means a love of ultimate truth and a life ruled by pure knowledge. And, therefore, everyone would live happily ever after, living a good human life because they would then possess unified souls dedicated to the aforementioned values.

Plato’s utopian vision has been roundly criticized, with some critics warning that his ideal would lead to a totalitarian state. It’s true that he presents us with a derogatory view of democracy, primarily because it is under that kind of government that all endeavors are esteemed or at least recognized as equally valuable or worthy of pursuit; and this, it is believed, would lead to chaos and vice. I can’t say Plato is completely wrong on this count; but I also can’t say he’s necessarily right, either. Modern democracy certainly has its problems and periodic all-out crises, but it certainly seems to me to be the best system we humans have been able to devise thus far in our history. I say this because it is precisely the fact that a democracy does allow for the deepest and widest possible array of projects that it is valuable.

But, as I alluded to before, our educators can be either direct or indirect. Indirect educators can be family members, sports figures, cultural icons, peers, or anyone else we esteem and desire to emulate. Direct educators are the teachers we encounter throughout secondary and postsecondary school: they instruct us in the particulars of the various subjects we’re interested in, but may also, at the same time, challenge us and guide us toward the discovery of our most durable talents and their realization in our unified, eudaimonistic undertakings — and, hopefully, to the realization that contributing to the happiness of society is essential to realizing our own happiness.

Rationally Speaking podcast: Sean Carroll on philosophical naturalism

Astrophysicist and author Sean Carroll joins this episode of Rationally Speaking, to talk about "naturalism" - the philosophical viewpoint that there are no supernatural phenomena, and the universe runs on scientific laws.

Sean, Julia, and Massimo discuss what distinguishes naturalism from similar philosophies like physicalism and materialism, and what a naturalistic worldview implies about free will, consciousness, and other philosophical dilemmas.

And they return to that long-standing debate: should scientists have more respect for philosophy?

Sean's pick: "The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human."

References: Moving Naturalism Forward workshop.

The American prison system

by Massimo Pigliucci

One of the things that has always struck me as different — and not in a good way — in the United States compared to other Western countries is the way Americans think (and act) about crime, particularly their prison system. Recently, my colleagues Ken Taylor (Stanford) and John Perry (University of California-Riverside) have tackled the issue on their wonderful podcast, Philosophy Talk (which comes with an associated blog, the tagline of which is cogito, ergo blog), causing me to ponder some more disturbing thoughts about it.

There are two issues that Taylor and Perry address, and which I wish to briefly discuss in turn: the basic statistics about the American prison system when compared to other countries (and what that implies), and the more fundamental question of what, exactly, we wish to accomplish by imprisoning people — a question you would think would be at the forefront of public discussions, but that instead appears to be nowhere in sight, probably because everyone (wrongly) assumes that the answer is obvious, one of those things that only philosophers and similarly misguided intellectual eggheads bother with.

So, the stats: at last count cited by Taylor and Perry (2008), 2.5 million Americans were in prison, a number to be compared with 1.5 million in China, particularly once we account for the fact that the Chinese population is four times as large as that of the US! In the Europe Union, a more proper comparison with the United States because of its Western style democracies, the total number of inmates is only 600,000, and yet the 27 nations of the European Union count 200 million more inhabitants than the US. Taylor and Perry continue: between 1987 and 2007 the cost of incarceration for American States has increased by 127% (adjusted for inflation), to a whopping $50 billion (in 2007). And then, of course, there are the ethnicity-specific statistics, according to which African Americans account for 47% of the inmate population, against only 12% of the total population, with Latinos trailing a bit behind (20% of inmates, 13% of the population). The implication, of course, being that whites are less represented than one would expect from their frequency in the general population.

If these numbers don’t disturb you, you might want to pay a visit to your family doctor. To begin with, why exactly are so many more people incarcerated in the US than in all the European Union countries combined? Well, one of the answers could be that those pinko Europeans are soft on crime, which not only is silly on the face of it, but also raises the question of why there are so many violent criminals in the US. Except of course for the additional fact that a large number of US inmates are there for non-violent crimes (500,000 just for drug use, about the same as the total European population of inmates). Either American society is far more violent than its European counterpart, or American politicians are far too happy to lock people away to look tough with their constituencies (which implies that Americans are far too inclined to imprison their fellow citizens). Or both, obviously.

The ethnic stats are more complex, and far more controversial. The straightforward liberal reading, of course, is that here are numbers that directly quantify the amount of racism in our society. The equivalently simplistic ultra-conservative reading is that, see, the stats confirm that all those differently colored people really are dangerous. The reality is likely to be somewhere in the complex middle. It seems obvious that Latinos and African Americans are indeed more likely to commit crimes than their simple proportional representation in the general population would predict. The question is why. Since I don’t subscribe to the (truly racist and scientifically unfounded) idea that different ethnicities carry different genes for violent behavior (or even for factors predisposing them to crime in general), then the conclusion would have to be that minorities in the United States still suffer from a number of disadvantages that the rest of us insist in not addressing, such as poverty, lower quality of education, lower quality of healthcare, less availability of jobs, and inferior housing. All of which are very good predictors of crime rates.

Then there is the second — more philosophical — issue raised by Taylor and Perry: what are prisons for? They quickly run through five reasons why we may want to incarcerate people: retribution, crime deterrence, rehabilitation, restitution to the victims, or social denunciation. In the first case, we should set up the system so that criminal are justly punished for what they did, though of course that raises the exceedingly thorny question of what, exactly, constitutes just punishment. In the second case, however, we are concerned with affecting the criminal’s cost-benefit analysis, so to decrease the chances that he (most criminals, particularly of the violent type, are men) will not in fact engage in the crime to begin with. In the case of rehabilitation, as Taylor and Perry point out, one cannot even properly talk of punishment, but rather of an attempt to change the ways of the individual and turn him into a productive member of society. Restitution to the victims is yet another concept possibly informing how and why we imprison people, where the goal is to set up conditions that make it possible for the criminal to compensate (according to whatever parameters) the victim or the victim's family. And finally, the social denunciation approach says that we imprison people because we wish to send the message that certain kinds of behavior are unacceptable in our society.

Naturally, we may wish to achieve more than one of these goals, but the point is that we ought to be clear on which ones, on how to prioritize them (is retribution more important than deterrence?), and especially on how to go about maximizing the likelihood of the intended outcome(s). But we don’t. The public and politicians don’t seem to make these (not so subtle) distinctions most of the time, let alone engage in serious reflection about what they mean and how they can be pursued. This is bizarre, considering that the prison system is dramatically affecting the lives of literally millions of people, many of whom arguably shouldn’t be there in the first place, as well as costing the rest of us an increasingly large bundle of money, at a time when cries of cutting the budget are all the rage. And they say philosophy is useless.

Love and reason?

by Massimo Pigliucci

Recently I attended a talk by Ronnie de Sousa, a philosopher at The University of Toronto, by the somewhat unusual, almost oxymoronic, title of “Love and Reason” (as opposed to, say, Love or Reason). It turned out to be a fascinating tour de force ranging from the Countess of Champagne and her 1176 verdict on the nature of love, to cognitive scientist’s Helen Fisher studies of the chemical underpinning of different aspects of love. Here I will limit myself to a few aspects of de Sousa’s talk (who graciously provided me with his original slides), but Ronnie is finishing a paper on the subject, so stay tuned for much more if what follows happen to sufficiently stimulate your curiosity.

First off, though, I simply cannot resist the temptation to quote the above mentioned Countess of Champagne in full. The quote actually allows de Sousa to introduce the framework of his talk (the relationship and difference between reasons and causes of love), but it is worth reading in its entirety for its own sake.

Apparently, back in 1176, a “Court of Love” was established — presided by the Countess herself — to address the question of “Whether love can have a place between spouses,” i.e. whether the very concept of love is compatible with matrimony. Here is the verdict quoted by de Sousa:

We state and affirm that love cannot extend its power to a married couple, for lovers give one another everything freely, without obligation or any necessity; conjugal partners, by contrast, are committed to doing one another’s will and not to deny anything to one another.

So there you have it, apparently duty and inclination are not compatible in this instance, a very stern, Kantian view of things. And indeed, Kantian interpretations of love were a major target of ferocious criticism (even downright scorn) in de Sousa’s talk, which was delivered with humor and even theatricality (he quoted several passages from literature classics, such as the Cyrano, and he did so very engagingly).

Ronnie clearly distinguished reasons of love from reasons to love, as well as between positive and negative reasons, and finally between reasons seen from the point of view of the lover and from that of the loved. I do not want to get too far into this particular aspect of his talk, but some tidbits will give you an idea.

For instance, most people would not accept “I love her because she is rich” as a good reason for love, just like — and the parallel here does a good amount of work in de Sousa’s scheme — we would find weird, within the context of a work of art, if someone were to say “it’s beautiful because it’s expensive.” Or consider this: we would take it as a good reason for someone to stop loving someone else if the former object of love were to turn monstrously evil. But it is hard to imagine the traction one would get by saying something along the lines of “I love him because he is not monstrously evil.” (Though I have to admit that I’ve heard people on the New York dating scene lower their acceptance bar almost as far...)

In one of my favorite bits during the talk, de Sousa presented his version of the famous Euthyphro dilemma, which in its original Platonic context represents the most powerful argument for the irrelevance of gods to morality. The love-related version of the dilemma goes something like this: is what we love of value to us because we love it, or do we love it because it has value? Be careful how you answer it, because either horn of the dilemma carries pretty logical consequences. The first possibility is tautologically self-referential, and would lead us to admit, among other unsavory things, that it is perfectly sensible to love the above mentioned monstrously evil individual (or to love anyone, really). The second option, however, raises the question of fungibility: let’s say that I think I love someone because she is smart, beautiful, and of good character. Well, there is always the possibility of eventually meeting someone else who is even more so in any (or all!) of said dimensions. That being the case, wouldn’t it make sense to “trade up,” so to speak? Switch to the newer, better model? While a distressing number of people do in fact do so without a thought, it seems a bit callous (not to mention extremely un-Kantian!) to treat someone who we allegedly love as if s/he were a car or a television set, no?

Which brings us (skipping around the actual sequence of the talk a bit) to how de Sousa deals with the problem of fungibility. He introduces Helen Fisher’s famous studies on the cognitive science of three distinguishable kinds of love: lust, romantic love (which Ronnie calls “limerence”), and attachment. I referred to the same research in Answers for Aristotle, and I think the general findings are interesting if, of course, open to the usual caveats and potential future falsification of any neurobiological piece of research on humans.

Fisher has described three behavioral syndromes, as well as their correlated hormonal profiles, that characterize different types of “love” in humans. In some cases the three represent a temporal sequence within a given relationship, but this is by all means not a necessity. The first type, lust, is characterized by being fairly object-generic, meaning that we can lust after a (great) variety of people, though of course even lust is somewhat discriminating in its targets. Lust drives sexual intercourse, and at the hormonal level is underpinned by androgens (especially testosterone) and estrogens. It typically has a time span measured in hours or minutes...

Next we have limerence (a word de Sousa credits to psychologist Dorothy Tennov), what most of us call romantic love. Very much unlike lust, the object of romantic love is unique, indeed obsessively so. Its function is to focus one’s energy and time on a particularly good candidate for long-term attachment, and it is chemically underpinned by catecholamins, hormones such as norepinephrine and dopamine. This phase can continue for weeks or months, and up to 2-3 years, depending on the people and the circumstances.

Finally — if a couple gets that far — we have long-term attachment. This is not focused on sex, though it can in fact arouse intense emotional distress. It is what allows people to raise families, which means that it is evolutionarily crucial, in a species such as ours, where long-term parental investment is vital for the survival and well being of the offspring. The chemistry here is dominated by oxytocin and vasopressin, and the duration is indefinite, ranging from several years to a lifetime.

What has all of this to do with fungibility? de Sousa argues that the philosophically relevant differences among the three types of love are that only lust is really fungible, that only limerence seems to be exclusive, and that only attachment has a significant historical component (meaning the unique, shared history of the people involved). If he is right, what makes long-term love (i.e., the sort that leads to attachment) non-fungible is not the exclusivity of the love object (he notes, reasonably, that people are capable of feelings of attachment toward more than one person), but rather the uniquely historical, unrepeatable, series of events that characterize the relationship. From this perspective, the longer one’s history of love with another person, the less fungible that person becomes — even though there may be another individual around the corner who is smarter, more attractive, etc.

I like the general idea, though I’m not sure I buy every aspect of it. For instance, I think the object of romantic love is indeed fungible, only on a different temporal scale than the object of lust. True, romantic love is exclusive, but it may well turn out to be only temporarily so. Indeed, I think even long-term attachment is open to the threat of fungibility, as in the case of relationships that end after many years (and even a number of children), leading one or both former partners to start new long-term, and at least occasionally just as unique and valuable relationships with other people.

However, what I think does happen in the transition between lust, romance and attachment is that fungibility becomes less and less likely, varying on a sliding scale with a maximum value in the case of lust, an intermediate one for romance, and a very low magnitude (but not necessarily zero!) for attachment. Whether this should be cause for moral concern, of course, is another matter.

Ronnie concluded his talk — which is much richer than I managed to convey here — by noting the following (and I am here quoting mostly verbatim): (a) The contingency of the circumstances that give rise to relationships makes them deeply a-rational (so long, Kant!); (b) They derive from chance priority of acquaintance, pheromone compatibility, genetic fatality, transference, and habit (i.e., they have many causes); and (c) None of the above mentioned factors count as reasons. The distinction between causes and reasons in philosophy in general, and in the philosophy of human action in particular, has a long and complex history. Still, as a distinction it is both clear and, I think, useful. In de Sousa’s hands it pretty much kills any rationalist, Kantian approach to the philosophy of love. And that, my friends, is no small accomplishment.

On signalling

by Ian Pollock

[Note: neither character in this dialogue represents any particular person, apart from the “people” who are always arguing about philosophy in my own head. I acknowledge that this conversation is totally unrealistic as a real-life event, for several reasons. (Some of which are signalling reasons!)]

Salviati: Hello, Sagredo!

Sagredo: Hi, Salviati. Good to see you. I’m just finishing up a blog post.

Salviati: On what?

Sagredo: It’s about this creationist, biblical literalist theory to the effect that there was once a water canopy around the earth. The idea is to account for where all the water in Noah’s flood came from.

Salviati: I take it you disapprove of the theory.

Sagredo: Of course! I don’t understand how anyone could possibly believe it.

Salviati: ...Hm, hang on a minute. I want to press you on something.

Sagredo: What is it?

Salviati: Well, when people say they can’t understand so-and-so’s behaviour, they can mean two things. Either they mean that they literally don’t comprehend the behaviour, or they mean they understand it in an intellectual sense, but are trying to morally distance themselves from it.

Sagredo: I think I mean that I literally don’t comprehend people who believe in stuff like this.

Salviati: Then you are at a disadvantage in writing your blog post, aren’t you - I mean, you should understand your opponents’ motivation, if possible. Anyway, what’s your argument?

Sagredo: A scientific takedown of the theory, followed by a critique of its motivations as being basically designed to reduce cognitive dissonance. Creationists know that all the water in the biblical flood needed to come from somewhere, so they invented this wild theory to account for it.

Salviati: Wait, so you do understand people who believe this stuff! They’re just reducing cognitive dissonance.

Sagredo: I guess, in a sense, yes.

Salviati: Why are you writing this post in the first place?

Sagredo: To combat this crazy pseudoscientific drivel.

Salviati: Do you know people who take this water canopy theory seriously?

Sagredo: Well, not personally, but some creationists buy into it.

Salviati: Some? Meaning it is critiqued by the creationists themselves?

Sagredo: Yes, to a certain extent.

Salviati: ...Okay, do you mind hearing some criticism?

Sagredo: I guess not. I’ll try to take it constructively.

Salviati: All right, I am just going to be blunt, then. This blog post you are writing is pure signalling.

Sagredo: Oh, not this “signalling” crap. Since when are you Robin Hanson?

Salviati: So you’re familiar with this line of argument.

Sagredo: I’ve heard it a lot from various “cynics.” But go ahead and make your case, I guess.

Salviati: All right. Here is the situation as I see it. You belong to an intellectual community of skeptics and atheists, in which creationism is the standard example of terrible pseudoscience.

Sagredo: Well, it is, and lots of people believe in it. The cost we are paying for science illiteracy is huge.

Salviati: Sure, I mostly agree, but that is another discussion. The point is, you belong to a group where you can gain status pretty easily by beating up on creationism - do you deny this?

Sagredo: I don’t deny it, but that’s not my motivation in writing this post.

Salviati: To be totally and suicidally frank, I don’t believe you. Here’s why: this blog post is focused on an incredibly tiny problem, and it’s actually pretty much useless in terms of dealing with that problem. I think you know that, in your heart of hearts.

Sagredo: Science illiteracy is not a tiny problem!

Salviati: But this particular crazy theory is. As far as I understand from you, only a small minority of creationists believe in it. Granting that combating creationism is important, combating an unpopular idea among creationists just seems like a really weird goal. It’s like you’re fighting a war and you decide to concentrate on intercepting the enemy’s supply of brussels sprouts - that’ll break their spirit!

Sagredo: It’s part of a general pushback against pseudoscience. You have to do that kind of stuff piecemeal.

Salviati: Sure, sure. The other thing is that even if we assume that it’s really important to debunk the water canopy theory, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say it’s already been done.

Sagredo: It has, but the message needs to be repeated in order to get through.

Salviati: Right, but there are diminishing returns here. That’s what I meant when I said your post is probably close to marginally useless. Being a doctor is uncontroversially important, right? Doctors save lives. But becoming a doctor only saves marginal lives if there’s a shortage of doctors in the area where you’re going to work - otherwise, you’re just replacing or supplementing some other person who was a doctor anyway, and who would have saved those lives anyway. That’s a roundabout way of saying that I think your post is one of many debunkings of the canopy theory, so it’s not making much difference above and beyond what the others are doing. And apart from that, as I said, the canopy theory just seems like a really tiny problem in the first place.

Sagredo: Well, so what? I suppose this isn’t the most important problem in the world, and I may not be combating it in the optimal way. I guess I just find the subject interesting. Didn’t you write some sort of gobbledigook about metaethics last week? Don’t tell me that solves some pressing problem of humanity. I still don’t buy the idea that my post is just “signalling.” I promise you, getting praise from fellow skeptics wasn’t going through my head at all when I thought of the idea.

Salviati: First of all, when I said that your post was pure signalling, I wasn’t accusing you of something unusually terrible. I think that a huge part of the stuff all people say and do is signalling - it’s in our nature as social creatures. That applies to myself as well: to the extent that I can understand my motivations for writing, some of them seem to be aiming at a sort of intellectual showing off. I just respect you and I want you to be a bit more self-aware about your own motivations. Like me, you obsess over logical fallacies and cognitive biases, but you seem to be blind to these other psychological forces that are driving your own behaviour.

Sagredo: I really wasn’t thinking about getting praise when I decided to write the post. Honestly!

Salviati: I both believe you and do not believe you. I believe you in that I don’t think you explicitly thought “let’s beat up on some dumb creationists to get validation from the in-group.” As in, I don’t think those words passed through your stream of consciousness. But I do think it’s very likely that the unconscious expectation of praise and status points was a major factor in what made this idea seem like a good one to you.

Sagredo: That’s totally unfalsifiable!

Salviati: It is invisible, true, even to your own introspection. But we can infer it from your behaviour. Again, I don’t want to beat up on you too much, but when somebody chooses to devote several hours of time and energy to “solving” an incredibly tiny problem in an incredibly ineffective way, and you know that they are smart enough to be able to realize this, you start looking for other explanations for their behaviour. That’s why I look at all the people writing reams of stuff about how Bigfoot doesn’t exist and can’t help but shake my head. Signalling fits nicely as an explanation, though. As an analogy... if a person says that something is 90% probable, and then it doesn’t happen, they could just be unlucky. But if they keep saying “90% probable” and these things keep not happening, you can infer that the person is likely overconfident.

Sagredo: When I say it’s unfalsifiable, I don’t just mean that you’re inferring something about my psychology. Being psychoanalyzed is really annoying, but sometimes it’s possible to do that. I mean that there is literally no way of proving it wrong. As for how that relates to this water canopy thing...

Salviati: Maybe we should stop talking about your blog post, so that the argument’s conclusion doesn’t involve any embarrassment for you personally. No offense, but that would lower the emotional stakes for you.

Sagredo: Yeah, ok, I am kind of feeling like an insect pinned in a display case right now. Well, one of Hanson’s examples I remember is charity. He says “charity is not about charity” and stuff like that. The idea is that people give to such ineffective charities, in such ineffective ways, that the whole point of charity must not be to help people or causes, it must just be to look good.

Salviati: I’m with you so far.

Sagredo: But then you have this whole movement for effective charity centered around Givewell and Giving What We Can and other organizations. What about the people donating to them? And then the Hansonian reply (apart from other criticisms of the ways people donate) is that these people are just signalling to more sophisticated in-groups. Do you see how that looks a lot like epicycles?

Salviati: Sure, superficially.

Sagredo: But that’s not the worst of it! The “everything is signalling” crowd still needs to explain altruistic acts by individuals who are totally anonymous and know that they are.

Salviati: Right. One idea here is that the people who are best at showing off in front of groups are not the people who are most explicit about showing off, but instead the people who are totally oblivious to the fact that they’re showing off, and totally convinced that their behaviour is motivated by other, good reasons. So donating anonymously to charity is a way to, as it were, convince yourself of your own altruism, in order to signal more effectively at others in other circumstances.

Sagredo: Wow, seriously? ...You might as well just be a Freudian at this point.

Salviati: Well, as a human, given that you are going to be deceptive, a really effective way to do it is to actually believe the deception (at least at the conscious level). It’s cognitively cheaper than trying to be some straight up Machiavellian plotter who believes A but says B - you don’t have to watch your tongue or your body language if you “believe” your own lies. And if the “beliefs” involved don’t come in contact with reality too often, it doesn’t hurt your interests very much if they’re technically false. But I concede that that explanation is a bit suspicious-looking and seemingly unfalsifiable. By the way, another theory that occurs to me for explaining anonymous donations is that they often aren’t very anonymous after all. Maybe anonymous donors usually do tell key people in their in-group and trust the word to spread. That might be worth investigating empirically.

Sagredo: What is the big appeal of this theory, anyway? Why are you seeing signals behind every bush like some phallus-obsessed Freudian?

Salviati: I’ve noticed that tendency myself, yes. But I honestly do think that you will just fail to understand people if you don’t take signalling motives into account all the time. Fail miserably. And you will also be selectively blind to your own motivations. We could talk about all sorts of behaviours, from table manners to military strategy... Here’s a throwaway example. Why does everybody talk about crime going up and being out of control, when we both know that in North America and the UK the crime rate has been going down for a while?

Sagredo: They’re misinformed by politicians and members of the media, who are themselves either misinformed or looking for votes.

Salviati: Okay, but why do you think things are always skewed in the direction of high crime as opposed to low crime? Well, look, here’s what we can say from the perspective of signalling. A signal is basically an action (often a speech-act) A that also carries information about some hidden variable B. In the case of politics, the “hidden variable” typically refers to inferred personal characteristics of the speaker, characteristics that look good or bad to their in-group.

Sagredo: How does this apply to the crime issue?

Salviati: So let’s say you’re a member of the public who doesn’t know very much about crime rates. Some high-profile shooting happens in your city’s downtown, and Politician #1 comes on TV and says “Crime is out of control! We must do something about shootings like this! We need more police, more censorship of video games, parents need to teach traditional values...” you know the usual social-conservative spiel. On the left, it would focus more on gun control and other causes celebres, but otherwise it’d be pretty similar. Then Politician #2 comes on TV and says “Actually, crime is pretty much under control, and getting more so every year. This act was terrible, but our laws are necessarily a balance between freedom and security, not to mention between security and scarce resources that can be used elsewhere. I don’t think we should take any additional steps in the wake of this shooting, current laws are adequate.”

Sagredo: Yeah, point taken, I see how the first politician looks much better as a person. The second politician sounds complacent, even callous. And that’s before somebody comes up with a devastating meme about their indifference to human life, referencing the recent shooting as emotional ammunition.

Salviati: It can be even worse in extreme cases! How would you like to argue the case against some new anti-paedophilia law? In the wake of a high-profile case whose details have been luridly reported by the media? It’s an especially horrifying self-perpetuating phenomenon because even people who agree with you will wonder, deep down, what kind of person you are if you’re willing to, ahem, stick your neck out for paedophiles. Free speech advocates run into the same problem, because in practice, they end up defending people like Holocaust deniers, or those tiresome artists who take a crap on a crucifix and put it in a gallery, or anti-Islamic types who are often motivated by xenophobia more than principle. Signalling incentives are horrible, so unless corrected, society tends to drift in whatever direction it’s easiest to moral-grandstand in favour of.

Sagredo: Do you have some solution for this problem?

Salviati: Not a comprehensive one. But at least we can raise people’s consciousness to the problem, so that the pundit who goes on TV and says something like “If this law saves even one child from a horrible fate, it will be worth any cost whatsoever!” gets shouted down for cheap, empty signalling. But on an individual level, it’s just another piece of the puzzle for understanding how the social world works. That’s why I decided to harass you about it, because I think you’d want to know more about how people tick, including yourself. There are a lot of other details to it, and more botanizing that you can do about signalling incentives, harmful signalling arms races, and application to other stuff besides politics, like philosophy or education. This is just the elevator pitch.

Sagredo: I guess I see your point; I can imagine how this idea would apply to lots of stuff. But I still think there is a huge danger of over-application and unfalsifiability.

Salviati: I agree with you there - it’s a powerful idea, but it can definitely eat your brain if you’re not careful.

Sagan beats Dawkins. In related news, education overcomes superstition

by Massimo Pigliucci

I have been doing public outreach for science since I originally moved to Tennessee in 1996. It has been a fun ride, and I’m sure it will continue to be that way for many years to come. But two of the first things I learned when debating creationists and giving talks about the nature of science were: a) nastiness doesn’t get you anywhere; and b) just because you have reason and evidence on your side doesn’t mean you are going to carry the day.

Hence, my sympathy for the mild mannered approach of Carl Sagan as evident in, say, The Demon Haunted World, or The Varieties of Scientific Experience, and my dislike of the more in-your-face take of those such as Dawkins, as fun as the latter may be for the in-crowd. Up until recently, however, I could only back up my preference with reasons of personal taste and anecdotal experience. Not any longer, now there is hard data.

A recent paper in PLoS One by Jessica Tracy, Joshua Hart, and Jason Martens explored the reasons why people prefer Intelligent Design type “explanations” to science-based ones such as evolution by natural selection. The authors carried out a series of experiments using an established technique in experimental psychology, known as “priming.” Before exposing subjects to, say, a writing by Michael Behe or Richard Dawkins, the researchers asked them to imagine and write about either their own death or some dental pain. Subjects were then given a short passage authored either by Behe or by Dawkins — neither of which was explicitly addressing religion — and were asked what they thought.

Subjects who were primed to imagine their death prior to reading the passages were inclined to like Behe better than Dawkins, and to accept ID accounts over evolutionary ones. The inference being that — as we all suspected — people are drawn to creationism out of emotional fears of personal annihilation, not by reasoned discourse.

Here is the first kicker, however: when the researchers also gave subjects an additional reading, from Carl Sagan, the results were different. In the short passage, Sagan was explicitly arguing that scientific explanations of natural phenomena do not have to detract from meaning (yes, I know that Dawkins also writes about this, but much less forcefully and convincingly, I think). The Sagan piece had the effect of countering Behe’s, even among people who had been reminded of their own mortality. Pretty neat, heh?

But there is more. An additional experiment was carried out by focusing on undergraduate and graduate students in the natural sciences, instead of the broader samples from the general population examined previously. Even after thinking about death, these subjects still favored biological explanations over Intelligent Design, and they even liked Dawkins better than Behe. It seems that education might trump people’s fear of mortality enough to make them understand that science is more sound than religion when it comes to explaining the natural world.

The bottom line is that we now have some of the first experimental evidence that: a) coupling scientific accounts of the world with more philosophical reminders of where meaning in life comes from, and b) simply teaching science, are effective ways to alter people’s perception of the evolution-creation debate.

Think about it: this means that an injection of philosophy and good science education actually makes a difference! Our efforts are not wasted, especially if we can remind ourselves of what should be obvious: people are attracted to pseudoscience not just because they don’t know enough science (though that is certainly the case), but because they find enhanced meaning in the mysterious. Paul Kurtz famously called it the transcendental temptation, and a strong temptation it is. The trick is to counter it with tools that cut deep enough into its emotional roots, not just addressing its surface appearance of rationalization.

Greta Christina on “mission drift” - A commentary

by Massimo Pigliucci

Greta Christina has penned a thoughtful essay on the issue of “mission drift” within the atheist and skeptic communities, which turns out to be an indirect response to the very same talk by Jamy Ian Swiss that led to PZ Myers’ rant about “quitting” the skeptic movement - see my commentary on that here.

Christina begins by asking a deceptively simple question: “If the atheist and skeptical movements focus on political and social justice issues, will that constitute mission drift?” Her initial answer is a simple “No,” but then she elaborates at length, and much of what she says makes eminent sense to me.

Christina immediately breaks down her question into two logically distinct components:

(1) that these movements expand the focus of their existing missions into new areas having to do with politics and social justice, in ways that are consistent with those existing missions and that constitute clear overlap between those missions and these issues;

(2) that the organizations in these movements pay attention to these issues in internal matters, such as hiring and event organizing.

Most of the essay (and most of my commentary) then focuses on (1), with a few brief comments on (2). Let me start with the latter, then, to get the easy stuff out of the way. Yes, of course atheist and skeptic organizations should engage in fair hiring practices, adopt equal opportunity employment policies, offer students rates, organize conferences in locations - when possible - that offer public transport access, choose venues that are wheelchair accessible and so forth. (I would cut some slack on other issues she brings up, like offering sign language interpretation and day care, simply because those things are costly, and many organizations of the type we are considering typically have very limited budgets. Even so, they should try if they can afford it.)

However, as Christina herself implies when she makes the parallel between atheist / skeptic organizations and IBM or the Audobon Society, these actions should be taken qua public organizations, not specifically as atheist / skeptic ones. It’s a matter of simple civil decency, period.

Assuming we are all square on (2), then, it’s time to tackle the significantly more thorny (1) above.

Let’s briefly consider some of Christina’s examples of issues that some people may regard as instances of “mission drift” for atheists and/or skeptics, but which she contends are not. Her list is long, and I do not actually disagree with pretty much any item within it (with the big caveat to which I’ll get below), but just a few examples will give you a good idea:

To skeptics: Why can’t all that rationality, critical thinking skills, scientific method, and prioritization of evidence be applied to testable claims having to do with social justice? … The claim that people have unconscious racial biases which affect our behavior is a testable claim. The claim that children raised in same-sex relationships grow up with deep psychological problems is a testable claim. The claim that people act significantly differently towards infants we think are male and infants we think are female is a testable claim.

To atheists: Why would it constitute mission drift for the atheist movement to focus on how religion harms people by undermining social justice? Why would it be mission drift to focus on the harm done by abstinence-only sex education; by the influence of the religious right on reproductive rights; by the influence of the religious right on public education and economic policy; by fraudulent preachers and psychics preying on impoverished communities?

Why indeed? I do not have any objection to expanding the scope of skepticism and atheism along those directions. In fact, this has been happening for a while. Every year, for instance, the organizers of both TAM (at the national level) and NECSS (at the regional, in this case New York, level) make a point of scheduling talks that aren’t confined to the classic workhorses of skepticism, like UFOs, astrology and so forth. And Christina should know that both American Atheists and CFI have long drawn attention to at least some of the religion-related issues she mentions.

But Christina seems (irritatingly, I must add) to wish to pit herself against what she repeatedly refers to as “the old guard”: Why should the agenda get to be set by the old guard? … Why should the people who are already in the skeptical and atheist movements, the people who have been in the

skeptical movements for years, be the ones to decide which internal policies are core issues for atheism and skepticism, and which ones are on the fringe?

Well, the obvious question is: why not? We all get to set the agenda for what is largely a grassroots movement, and we do so via conversations like the one that Christina has started. But why shouldn’t “the old guard” be a (major) part of it? Just like in every movement, people who have been active for a long time deserve our respect because they’ve been there long before us, have experience, and have demonstrated their ability to get things done. Of course they shouldn’t get to set the agenda in a smoke-filled room somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert, but they do deserve more respect than the contemptuous dismissal that emerges from Christina’s comments.

Niceties to the old folks aside, there is a larger problem that we all have to tackle in the process of expanding the concerns of the atheist and skeptic movements to the areas mentioned by Christina. It’s the same problem that I repeatedly point out to my feminist philosophy and gender studies academic colleagues: be careful not to mix too liberally what is with what ought to be, because you may regret it.

Recently I chided Michael Shermer for his scientistic tendencies, commenting that what he seems to want is a scientific imprimatur on his libertarian ideology. Certain libertarian policies may or may not work, and that surely is an empirical question about which we need data before we agree or disagree. But my fundamental objection to libertarianism qua ideology is that it doesn’t take in due account issues of social justice. That objection is philosophical in nature, and precedes (though it is not entirely independent of) the empirical. Should it turn out, for instance, that cutting aid to the poor, or undermining a guarantee to health care, or severely curtailing public access to education are somehow more “efficient” from a market perspective, I’d say the market perspective be damned. Certain considerations of value trump pragmatism and efficiency (up to a point, of course, I don’t live in a la-la land where economy just doesn’t matter).

The same goes for a lot of feminist philosophy, where colleagues engage in the sort of debunking that Christina is advocating, a deconstruction of allegedly scientific claims about race, gender, and so forth. This is crucial as a corrective to false, misleading, or discriminatory notions about women and various ethnicities that get cloaked in the mantle of science. But the argument for racial and gender equality should be independent of any particular outcome of empirical research.

I think that the best science does indicate that there are no group-based cognitive and few if any innate behavioral differences between genders. But what if better research should eventually show otherwise? Would we then have to bite the bullet and say, yup, I’m sorry, turns out that group X really does have structural cognitive differences with respect to group Y, so we really shouldn’t allow X to compete for the same jobs or resources as Y?

I don’t think so. We know that there is huge variation in physical and cognitive endowments among individuals (regardless of group), but nobody in his right mind would therefore argue for special privileges for particularly strong or smart people. The fact of the differences simply doesn’t enter into the judgment value of how we ought to construct our society.

Or take the issue of gay rights, over which American society is suddenly making a stunning amount of rapid progress. We often hear “defenses” of the gay life style in terms of it not being the result of a choice. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, who cares? So what if someone chooses to be gay, as opposed to having a strong instinctual propensity for it? Why should the cause of the behavior have anything whatsoever to do with issues of rights? But if advocates of gay rights insist on the “it’s not a choice” position, they open themselves - pointlessly, I think - to the possibility that future science may show that it is indeed a choice. Then what?

So, I absolutely welcome both Christina’s broader point that skepticism and atheism benefit from an expansion of their horizons, and her specific list of things that should be open to skeptical investigation or lend themselves to atheist advocacy. But let’s be clear that skeptics and atheists should also be interested in truth and intellectual honesty, wherever it may lead. And should it lead in directions that are not in line with our ideals, we should be prepared to either bite the bullet and modify those ideals or make a persuasive philosophical argument for why they should trump the empirical specifics. Are skeptics and atheists ready to boldly go there as a movement?