What’s the Matter with Portland?

May 24, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Water Flouridation has been the policy of the US Dept. of Health since 1951. The benefits of small amounts of fluoride in public drinking water has been well studied. The low concentrations of fluoride used have been deemed harmless by numerous studies.

So why did citizens in Portland, Oregon just strike down a proposal to fluoridate their water:

Fluoride supporters, it appeared, had everything going for them.

Five Portland city commissioners had voted to add fluoride to the city water supply. Health advocacy groups, and many of the city’s communities of color, lined up behind the cause. And proponents outraised opponents 3-to-1.

But none of that was enough. For the fourth time since 1956, Portlanders on Tuesday night rejected a plan to fluoridate city water, 60 percent to 40 percent.

I’m honestly curious. During the 50′s and 60′s, the anti-fluoridation movement was bound up with the anti-communist conspiracy folks. Nowadays, what’s the beef?

Some of it seems to be an instinctive libertarian streak. If the government is for it, they’re against it. But much of it seems to be the sort of emotional denialism that we’ve seen in the anti-vaccination movement. Consider this poster:

Despite its financial disadvantage, however, Clean Water Portland proved better at mobilizing an electorate wary of adding a chemical to one of the nation’s cleanest sources of drinking water. Signs calling for residents to reject “fluoridation chemicals” popped up on lawns across the city even as stories in the national media popped up, poking fun at the city’s resistance to a common practice.

It’s those nasty, nasty chemicals, you see. We don’t want people adding NaF to our H20.

Orac at Respectful Insolence has more media from the anti-fluoridation side. He notes that they use the word “chemical” about a bajillion times, ignoring the actual definition of the word. My suggestion is that we go to Portland and preach the dangers of the chemical “dihydrogen monoxide”.

Filed Under: Medicine, Science Leave a Comment

Conspiracies? Blame the Amygdala

May 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Over at the New York Times, an article about the developing cognitive theory behind conspiracy theory:

Economic recessions, terrorist attacks and natural disasters are massive, looming threats, but we have little power over when they occur or how or what happens afterward. In these moments of powerlessness and uncertainty, a part of the brain called the amygdala kicks into action. Paul Whalen, a scientist at Dartmouth College who studies the amygdala, says it doesn’t exactly do anything on its own. Instead, the amygdala jump-starts the rest of the brain into analytical overdrive — prompting repeated reassessments of information in an attempt to create a coherent and understandable narrative, to understand what just happened, what threats still exist and what should be done now. This may be a useful way to understand how, writ large, the brain’s capacity for generating new narratives after shocking events can contribute to so much paranoia in this country.

The problem is that such events leave people feeling powerless, and the resulting accelerated thought process will produce narratives that leave the thinker feeling more in control. Counterintuitively, one of the easiest ways to feel in control is paranoia. The belief that you have an understanding that the other guy doesn’t makes you feel empowered. So does the feeling that you’ve done all the research yourself and come to the truth, rather than relying on the so-called experts.

Throw in the usual logical fallacies that humans are prone to, like confirmation bias, genetic fallacies and red herrings, and you have all the ingredients you need to create contrived conspiracy theories. These theories give the believe a scapegoat and a frame of reference, but they have little connection to reality. These theories have real world impacts:

For example, research has shown that African-Americans who believe AIDS is a weapon loosed on them by the government (remembering the abuses of the Tuskegee experiment) are less likely to practice protected sex. And if you believe that governments or corporations are hiding evidence that vaccines harm children, you’re less likely to have your children vaccinated. The result: pockets of measles and whooping-cough infections and a few deaths in places with low child-vaccination rates.

Filed Under: Politics, Science Leave a Comment

God Has Legs?

May 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment

David Hayward, AKA nakedpastor, sketched his version of the atheist/theist argument:

The post is titled, “how an atheist reaches out to a believer,” but obviously the image shows that it goes both ways. The cartoon is inspired by Steven Olsen, who wrote a piece on counter-evangelism.

In his post, Olsen compares belief in a deity to belief in Bigfoot. Hayward responds:

I’ve never understood how some atheists leap from God to Bigfoot. Some ideas or theories are valid to consider and others are not. I think the possible existence of God, or the idea of God, or the theory of God, is more valid to explore than the possible existence of Bigfoot, or the idea of Bigfoot, or the theory of Bigfoot. Some ideas, some possibilities, have better legs than others.

Well, Bigfoot has some legs. He’s got to, they have to support those feet. Meanwhile, anthropomorphic Gods are out of fashion, so no legs for Him … er, It.

Seriously, I’m not sure how Hayward arrives at his assessment of probability. I have a hunch that it comes down to the differing presuppositions between a theist and an atheist.

While my default stance is to believe that Bigfoot doesn’t exist, the idea of it’s existence doesn’t seem invalid. The existence of Bigfoot would not require many new assumptions, since we’ve got primates and human, and since we still occasionally stumble across unknown species. If Bigfoot exists, the field of biology will not change in the slightest.

In contrast, the existence of a deity that fits the classic model of the Christian God would change things a great deal. God is timeless – what does that even mean? God is all powerful – where exactly is this energy coming from and where is it going? God is immaterial – but how does something without substance operate? God is beyond human categories and understanding, yet we know that He loves us – wtf?

Occam’s razor states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. The existence of a God requires whole new realms of assumptions. Physics would have to be rewritten to account for such a force or being.

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be much need for the God hypothesis to explain the workings of the universe. With all the new assumptions necessary, the God hypothesis seems like a razor bait if there ever was one. The existence of Bigfoot seems unremarkable by comparison.

Filed Under: Christianity, Science Leave a Comment

Mapping Hate

May 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Dr. Monica Stevens, assistant professor of geography at Humboldt State University in California, has turned her academic focus in an interesting direction. Working with a team of undergrads, Dr. Stevens has sorted through over 150,000 tweets containing racial or sexual slurs and produced a map of America showing the distribution of their origin.

The result is a “hate map” that shows which areas of the United States produced the most tweets, which can be filtered for various types of slur. Here’s New York’s distribution of tweets containing homophobic slurs:

Dr. Stevens explained the purpose of this map to a New York channel:

“So these are just looking at where the tweets are that are most hateful and hurtful. These are the communities where we see gay kids really struggling and needing projects like the ‘It Gets Better’ project,” said Dr. Monica Stephens from Humboldt State University.

Stephens says what makes her research special is that her team actually read every tweet to determine whether it was meant in a negative or positive way. Stephens says places that have high frequencies of hateful tweets, such as Lake Placid, Saranac Lake and Massena, should use this as a wake-up call.

Those three cities are in the Adirondack region, or the upper right of the image. More interesting to me is the large red dot between Buffalo and Rochester. Anybody know what’s going on in the Lockport/Medina region?

The full map is available here.

Dr. Stevens contributes to the blog Floating Sheep, and the process is explained there.

Filed Under: Science, Sexuality Leave a Comment

Kent Hovind Teaches World History

May 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Kent Hovind’s PhD thesis is circulating again, thanks to wikileaks and blogs like Leaving Fundamentalism. This thesis for a doctorate in Philosophy of Christian Education was submitted to Dr. Wayne Knight of Patriot Bible University, pictured right.

It’s bad.

Oy.

Folks like Adam Benton have been picking out favorite quotes. It’s hard to know where to stop with a thesis that begins “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida.”

What’s interesting is that Hovind seems to believe that evolution has always been with us. It’s basically a religion, started by Satan – literally – that has spread around the world and influenced nearly all non-monotheistic religions. I think he gets this from Henry Morris’ The Long War Against God, which basically makes that claim. Anyway, as evidence – or just to fill pages – Hovind goes through world history and world religion to classify ideas as godly or evolutionary.

And of course the whole thing is written like Hovind was talking to school children. We get sections like this: “Aristotle was the tutor to a man named Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great was the leader of the Greek Empire of the Third Century B.C. He spread the teachings of Aristotle all around his empire.”

Can you say “Hellenization” boys and girls? Good, have a candy.

Or consider this section:

The five major Eastern religions that developed during this time were Hinduism, Confucianism, Zoroasterism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Because of the atheistic and pantheistic philosophies of these religions, and the lack of importance placed on God, the entrance of communism into these countries was very simple. When the evolutionary doctrine was taught in these countries, the people did not have to change their religion in order to include it. Evolution and communism blended in fine with the Eastern religions. In about 1895, a man named Yen Fu translated Thomas Huxley’s book into Chinese. That was probably the turning point in China. It led the way for communism to take over so many of the oriental countries.

It’s just fractally wrong.

Filed Under: Bible, Christianity, Science Leave a Comment
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