Lady Gaga Versus The Secret

If you don't know what The Secret is, consider yourself lucky to have escaped one more instance of the sort of pseudo-mystical self-help craze that mostly helps the author. If you don't know who Lady Gaga is, you don't actually live on this planet, so please leave a comment in the interest of furthering human knowledge. If you've been tormented by the desire to know which of these media darlings would win in a head-to-head battle, your life is about to get so much better.

The battleground:

Just like Lady Gaga herself, her motivational advice is controversial. Essentially, she suggests that images of success (e.g., trophies) can take the place of actual successes (i.e., more victories). So instead of going out and making it happen, we reflect on past or imagined glory and do nothing. The symbol replaces the reality. On the other hand we have Rhonda Byrne, the Australian TV ad executive who wrote The Secret. A perpetual bestseller, The Secret advocates creative visualization, which involves creating vivid and compelling pictures of your heart's desire, with the aim of drawing this vision toward you. If you believe and even act as if your accomplishments have already happened, Byrne argues, then happen they will.

The test:

The first clear voice on this issue of fantasy was that of Sigmund Freud, who wrote about the "irrational libido," the part of our psyche that lives for immediate pleasure. To accomplish this, the libido uses what Freud termed a "primary process," where it "produces a memory image of an object needed for gratification in order to reduce the frustration of not having been gratified yet." So we imagine everything from revenge to accomplishment and then, without doing anything more, receive pleasure from the image alone. When we mature, we put primary processes in check and graduate to "secondary processes," which deal with reason and reality. So as adults, we are able to delay gratification and endure the pain necessary to bring our plans to fruition. In short, Freud is definitely a Lady Gaga fan. Images and symbols, such as trophies, may be pleasurable to gaze upon but they can prevent us pursuing the real thing.

Alright, psychoanalysis is more than a century old and not exactly cutting edge science. But we can do better. Over the last decade, Gabrielle Oettingen of New York University has done a string of studies that test the power of fantasy on everything from romantic success to getting your dream job. Her basic design is to have three groups of subjects: a fantasy group, a control group, and a mental contrasting group. Fantasy groups are just that: essentially, proponents of The Secret who imagine they already have their desired outcome. The control group is the baseline, people left alone to their own devices. Then there is the mental contrasting group, basically following a form of Lady Gaga's recommendation. They mentally contrast by fantasizing about what they want but then immediately afterwards compare where they are now with where they want to be. So if they want a better relationship, they fantasize about being with that gorgeous guy or gal but then deeply reflect afterwards on how they don't have him or her. The mental contrasting group always ends by contrasting fantasy with reality.

Who wins? Lady Gaga or The Secret?

The answer. I only wish the stakes were higher.

The best things come across Twitter. Thanks to Sigrid Ellis for this one.

Enough With the Distractions

Rebecca Watson's talk from the CFI Leadership Conference, on why the secular movement is important for women, even when it makes them less than welcome.



Why are we talking about where anyone mentioned in this talk was sitting when it was given, rather than the topic of the talk itself? No, don't answer that.

Talking About Leadership

Prior to the start of Skepchickcon, the skeptics track at CONvergence, Skepchick hosted a workshop on effective activism, led by Desiree Schell and Maria Walters. If you get a chance to attend this workshop in another venue, do it. It's the most productive couple hours on the topic you're going to find. If you don't have the chance to attend, at least read the manual (pdf) they put together on the topic. Then use it when you're planning some kind of action.

Before the workshop started, I had a chance to talk with Debbie Goddard, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at last year's Skepchickcon. Debbie is the campus outreach coordinator for the Center for Inquiry and the director of African Americans for Humanism.

Debbie and I spoke about skeptical leadership, and it was a particularly interesting time to do so. Rebecca's post on naming names in her talk at the CFI leadership conference had just come out. This was a conference that Debbie had organized and run. Also, earlier this year, I had expressed some criticism of CFI Michigan's leadership for their promotion of an evolutionary psychology speaker and their reactions to my post and Bug Girl's dissecting the speaker's research.

Debbie and I had a good talk, and I've been meaning ever since to write up a few thoughts on leadership. Note that these are my thoughts, not Debbie's, although I'm comfortable saying that Debbie and I agree on a few things:

• Leadership is largely a set of skills that can be taught.


• Due to the nature of skepticism and atheism, leaders in these movements may emerge from the ranks based on skills other than leadership. That's natural and expected.


• Skepticism and atheism, as broad movements, need to find a way to reliably instill these skills in their leaders to create stronger movements.


• We need to provide support for leaders independent of the groups that they're leading. That is to say both that pooling talent and knowledge is more effective and that it isn't healthy for an activist organization's leader to receive all their social support from within the organization.


• We're only in the beginning stages of treating leadership skills as important, but we're already making good strides.


• Moving this quickly, as with any kind of change, is going to produce some pain.

Now, speaking only for me, I think there are some lessons on leadership to take home from the events of the past few months. I will also be naming names here, but I should note that my intent is to provide concrete examples and to draw something good out of painful events, not to shame anyone. None of what I'm about to say is or should be transparently obvious to everyone. These are things we need to learn.

Why should you pay attention to me on the topic? Well, maybe you shouldn't. My experience with successful leadership is mostly secondhand. However, I grew up with a mother who ran a nonprofit and eventually served in a number of public offices, including as mayor of her small town. I was constantly privy to these considerations as a teenager, and the topic has continued to be something the two of us discuss. In my professional career, I've worked very closely with management for over a decade, mostly crafting communications but also acting as a sounding board for all sorts of leadership decisions.

Probably just as importantly, I've failed miserably at leadership. It hasn't happened because I don't understand the principles and responsibilities (which is why I've been given the job more than once). Meetings I run accomplish their goals and end early. Discussions I moderate stay productively on topic. But anything more sustained than that? I fail because the requirements of leadership grate very hard on this particular slightly disabled introvert. I know what kinds of jobs I'm not suited to and why. And that brings me to the first lesson of leadership.

Who's in Charge Here?

There's a bit of folk wisdom that gets passed around that the last person you should want elected to political office is someone who wants the job. Being represented by Al Franken and Keith Ellison, I have to dismiss this as unworkably cynical, but there is a small grain of truth to be found in it nonetheless.

The advantages of leadership are generally improved status and a greater ability to push through your own agenda. Neither of these advantages should be indulged indiscriminately. Authority doesn't make one inherently any more likely to be right, so it's important to remain approachable and to encourage challenges to your ideas. Also, among atheists and skeptics in particular, an authoritarian leadership style is less likely to be desired or tolerated.

If you're leading a healthy organization, you will constantly be dealing with people who want to improve it. You won't be in a position to pull your group along in your wake, because your organization will be vigorous enough to push you in the direction its members already want to go. You'll be able to steer and to make sure nothing goes off the rails, but the momentum won't be yours. High status in this scenario simply means that you're the person everyone comes to with their ideas.

This is a great position for an organization to be in, but it means that the perqs of leadership largely disappear. The downsides of leadership do not.

What Have You Done for Me Today?

As a leader, you help to set the goals and priorities of your organization. Unfortunately, you don't really get credit for those. As the incident with CFI Michigan's promotion of the evolutionary psychology event showed, you get the credit and blame for what actually happens at any given time, whatever your intent.

Comments from the leaders of CFI Michigan said that they wanted people to ask questions at events and to challenge speakers. However, neither the email notifying people of the event nor their calendar suggested people be prepared to ask questions or pointed them to the resources they would need to challenge the speaker on the controversial parts of the talk. They also said that they didn't in any way endorse the speaker or the material, but at least one group leader put out a communication supporting the speaker in the days following my criticisms and Bug Girl's.

No matter how much work CFI Michigan put into maintaining impartiality toward the events they promoted, no matter how often they told the members who showed up at their events that they should be challenging speakers in the Q&As, for this particular event, their website and their behavior didn't support those goals. For all the work they do, they were still on the hook for what happened during this one event.

Hands Off

Before you rise to the level of leadership in your organization, you have the luxury of concentrating on the organization's mission. You can, personally, get an awful lot done. In fact, this may be what propels you to leadership, where a cruel surprise awaits you: It's time to say goodbye to that kind of productivity.

Once you become a leader, you have a lot more to pay attention to. Do these members or factions need someone to negotiate their differences? Does this member need some extra attention to contribute fully? Does someone need to produce and file paperwork? Does this meeting need to be kept on track? Do new members need to be recruited to fill various jobs? Does someone need to figure out where you're going to meet while your normal venue is closed for renovations? Does someone need to research your group's legal responsibilities in some new situation?

You may not have to do all of these personally, but as a leader, you're responsible for making sure they happen. This leaves you less time to write or otherwise personally get your group's message out, less time to build relationships for their own sake, less time to sit down and enjoy the purely social aspects of your group's activities.

Instead, you get to make things easier for everyone else who is doing what used to take up all your time and motivate you to keep going. Delegation isn't always fun, because it means giving up the place and activities you originally chose for yourself, but it's critical to the success of your group.

Say Goodbye to Privacy

This isn't entirely true, but it's worth thinking about. When you gain disproportionate influence, everything you say and do becomes a little more important. For example, D. J. Grothe has a large number of friends in the skeptical community. He believes in his friends, and naturally, he wants to offer them his personal support. However, he is also the president of the JREF, which means that when he does something like comment on Lawrence Krauss's defense of a convicted statutory rapist, people sit up and pay attention.

As he discovered in that particular circumstance, he no longer has the luxury of simply saying, "I'm sure my friend is a good guy." When he comments on that or any other contentious issue, he--and by extension, the JREF--is seen to be taking a side, whatever his intention. His position of leadership meant that he had to bring himself up to speed on all the details of the situation and make a more formal, informed comment. To his credit, he did just that.

This is also the trap in which Stef McGraw found herself unenviably caught in her disagreement with Rebecca Watson. From the way she has responded, she expressed what was intended to be a personal opinion about Rebecca's video. However, she did so on her organization's blog. And even had she restricted her opinion to a personal blog, her position as Director of Activities for the University of Northern Iowa Freethinkers and Inquirers means that official notice had to be taken of her position. When the number one reason women give for not continuing to attend atheist and skeptic meet-ups is that they're treated as though they're only there as potential dates, there is no option for the larger community to ignore her opinions on what women in the movement should consider normal and expected.

Expressing a personal opinion in public as an organization's leader is a fraught proposition, no matter how much separation you attempt to maintain. This is one of the reasons we need to find better ways to provide social support for these leaders, venues in which they can air those first, half-formed opinions about current events and get feedback before they wade into the public fray.

You're All Alone Up There, or You Should Be

Another reason we need to encourage leaders to exchange ideas and support each other behind the scenes is that groups of freethinkers shouldn't ever be placed in the position of "My group/leaders, right or wrong." We have some justifiable pride in our organizations and their leaders, but if that pride becomes tribalism, we're undercutting our own mission.

There will be mistakes made by the leader of any group. Even if most of our leaders weren't fairly new to leadership, this would be true. Similarly, there will be differences in groups' priorities and missions that will result in disagreements between individuals at the leadership level. People will not always agree on how to work together.

This is understandable and inevitable. It can, and will, also generate frustration and misunderstandings. The ratio of reward to annoyance will sometimes become ridiculously tiny. A leader in that position needs a safe place to vent all those negative feelings.

That leader's organization is the wrong place for that. Social media is often the wrong place for that. Why? Because as a leader, you've lost the ability to make public personal statements on official business. You are speaking as your group, and people will respond to that.

If someone disagreed with you, they will be seen as having disagreed with your group--and the people in it. If someone insulted you, they will be seen as having insulted your group--and the people in it. And if they didn't do either of these things, because you misinterpreted what happened, they will still be seen as having done so because you have put your authority behind your interpretation. Then you will have, not two people who need to straighten things out, or simply decide whether joint goals are more important than bad feelings, but two groups of people who need to do that. That is a significantly larger proposition.

Leaders need confidants who are not invested in the leader's organization, people who are not in a position to be led, preferably people who also have leadership experience. They also need to exercise discretion in what conflicts they treat as matters that concern their entire group.

Final Thoughts

This isn't as coherent a whole as I'd intended when I decided to write about it, which is part of why it's been a month between the conversation and this blog post. I expect I'll be revisiting the topic as I dig into it further. I also hope to engage Debbie in further, more public discussion on leadership.

In the meantime, however, I'm interested in others' thoughts on the matter. What leadership lessons are particularly important to broad, only loosely organized movements like the skeptics and atheists?

A Letter to Professor Dawkins from Victims of Sexual Assault

Thank you to Bug Girl for suggesting this. If you are a survivor and wish to have your name added to this letter, let me know, either in the comments or by email (see the sidebar for my address). If you wish, you may reprint this letter in full elsewhere, as long as you link back to this post for the full list of those who have signed.

If you need background on this, try this post. If you want to argue about this, and you are not Richard Dawkins, go there or get your own blog. Comments here will be moderated as I see fit.

Dear Dick:

At your request, we write to you to tell you what it is that you do not understand about elevators, invitations, and sexual assault. Who are we, and why are we in any position to tell you anything? We are atheists and skeptics, but more relevantly, we are victims of sexual assault.

There are two important things to note about Rebecca Watson's experience. The first is that she had spent much of her evening telling the people around her, "Please don't hit on me," and finished by saying she was done talking and wanted sleep. This was ignored by the man now widely referred to as Elevator Guy. (Yes, it's been established that he was in a position to hear her. Yes, it's been established that he followed her out of the space in which she'd been saying this and got on the elevator with her.)

She had said, by unequivocal implication, "No." He ignored this and did what he wanted to. This is important.

The second important thing to know is that her response was to say publicly, one more time, "Please don't do that. It makes me uncomfortable." That's it. That was her entire response to Elevator Guy beyond telling him she wouldn't go to his room.

For that response, Rebecca came under considerable fire. This is also important.

The entire drama-filled discussion came about because Rebecca asserted her right and the right of other women to say, "No," and be heard. It happened because she asserted that men, as well as women, have a role to play in maintaining that right.

Then you spoke. Then you, widely regarded as one of atheism's leaders, one of the Four Horsemen, decided you needed to say something about this.

You didn't have to do that. If you felt, as your comments seem to indicate, that too much attention was being paid to this event, you could have simply declined to add yours.

However, that wasn't what you did. Instead, you said that Rebecca, who was voicing our concerns, was thereby telling other women with other concerns that they were whining. Or perhaps that the rest of us who supported Rebecca when she was criticized for expressing her preferences were accusing these women of whining.

Even if you had stopped there, this would merit an apology. Not only has Rebecca spoken out loudly against female genital mutilation (drawing the ire of those who told her she wasn't paying enough attention to the boys) and other religion-driven wrongs against women and girls, but her demand that women's self-determination be respected is exactly what needs to spread in order to prevent the ills you mention. If this is an issue you care about, instead of a distraction from Rebecca's point, you should be thanking her for her work instead of emphasizing the "chick" in the name of her organization, diminishing her stature.

Then, in response to complaints about that, you told us all that what happened to Rebecca--having her clearly and repeatedly expressed preferences about being hit on ignored--was "zero bad." It should be clear by now why that requires a correction from you. It also calls for another apology, whether or not you knew the facts above when you wrote your comment. If you didn't know, you weren't in any state to lend your position and reputation to any characterization of what happened, much less the mischaracterization you used.

That is where you injured us, the victims. You have made one more space blatantly unsafe to us. We don't mean safe as in free from any kind of sexual interest. We're not asking for that, and we don't want it. We mean that you, a leader in our community, made free with a woman's experience and rewrote it to suit your own ends.

You decided you knew better than she did what had happened, and you were comfortable explaining it to everyone else. That is part of how communities are ruined and ultimately shaped to support sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape. That is how offenders operate and how they are excused. That is how the world that hurt us was built. And you have added to that.

That is why you owe us an apology as much as you owe Rebecca. When may we expect it?

Sincerely,

Stephanie Zvan, survivor of teen sexual assault
Bug Girl, survivor of a date rape in 1980
Abigail Marceluk Parker
Chris Tucker
Elyse Anders, rape survivor
Dana Hunter, raped at age 18
Megan Wells, survivor of teen sexual assault
Tracy Walker, raped at 15
Danarra Ban
Paul Mannering
Andrea Gatley, sexually assaulted at age 14. In an elevator in a hotel.
Carol Levesque
Anneliese Bowman
Debbie Hadley, lucky to have fought off two sexual assault attempts by men who didn't believe no means no
Cori Frazer, survivor of childhood sexual abuse
Leilah Thiel, sexually assaulted at age 16
Helen Krummenacker, victim of repeated schoolground gropings
Edie Howe, assaulted at 7, 9, early teens, by both husbands, by strangers three times
BeardofPants, survivor child sexual abuse, age 7
Julia Heathcote, survivor of sexual assault by her PhD advisor
Rebecca Dominguez, survivor of sexual assault and date rape
Monado, survivor of groping (age 13), rape threats for refusing one of those innocent invitations to go for a ride (age 16), partner rape (age 35)
Doubting Thomas, gang raped at 18
Anarchic Teapot
Amanda W. Peet, date-raped at age 25
Zandperl
Alice, raped at 16, assaulted at 19
Melanie Mallon
Susan Silberstein, survivor of husband and stranger rape
Stephanie Zierenberg, victim of acquaintance rape at 24
Janice Clanfield
Kelly Sexton
Lynn Wilhelm, date raped in the 80s
Robin Buckallew, victim of childhood sexual assault, age 7
Catherine Ann, date-raped at age 30
Shoshana Kane, biologist, atheist, skeptic, rape survivor
Solvei Blue, survivor of sexual assault at age 19
Dr Fiona Wallace MB BS(London), MA, assaulted age 14 when babysitting - by the child's father
Nicole P., repeatedly raped by ex-fiance
Dorothy M., victim of kidnapping, assault and rape, daughter of a victim of child molestation, mother of a victim of date-rape
Sandy H., survivor of childhood sexual assault
Anne Marie Newman, victim of acquaintance rape, sexual assault by a "friend," and sexual harassment at work
Alianna B., stalked and sexually harassed for 3 1/2 years
Calebandrew, rape at the age of 15
Catherine Schneider, sexually abused by father from birth to age 14; raped by teen boyfriend age 15-17; gang raped by acquaintances age 22
Skepticalbunny, date rape survivor in 1982
Emily Dale, raped at age 16
Professor Anonymous_Female_Voice_Specialist, BS, MA, first sexually assaulted at age 3 or 4 and several times thereafter, at various ages
Nichole Filbert, sexually assaulted and raped in the process of leaving abuser
Nikoel Stevens
Carolyn, raped on 30th birthday
NameHidden
Maggie Champaigne
Sarah Killcoyne, sexual assault survivor
Emily F, rape survivor
Dianne K, molested at age 9, groped on the bus at 14
Kate W., molested at age 14, groped by multiple strange men, assaulted at age 25
WMDKitty, survivor of domestic assault
Jan Bunten
Bethany Baker, sexually assaulted at age 14
Wilma Janssen, assaulted multiple times, first time at 17
Chris Rhetts
Lee Ruby, survivor of childhood sexual abuse
ChristineCCR, raped, stalked, and sexually harassed
Jennifer Forester, raped by multiple partners
Lynne, raped and multiply assaulted
Cafegirl1995, raped at 13, assaulted at 14
Gwen Olson RN, sexually assaulted by a coworker
Lia C., molested at age 10, groped and ejaculated upon while riding the train at age 19, and date-raped at age 26
Katherine Ann B., survivor of multiple partner sexual assaults, two assaults by strangers, and kidnapping and assault by ex-partner
P. Adams, date raped at age 18
ephymeris, raped and molested repeatedly as a child, raped as a teen
CathyC, survivor of childhood sexual abuse and multiple sexual assaults
Sue Williams, date raped at 20, assaulted multiple times
Jennifer Haden, molested as a child and recently drugged and assaulted
Alexandra B, drug-raped at 18, other various sexual assaults
FranW, raped at age 25 by partner's contrivance
Jafafa, sexual abuse victim ages 11-14
Mrs. Carol King, first sexual assault at age 7 with more following
StarsEnd42, sexually assaulted on very first date ever, sexually asaulted again at a conference
PixelFish, sexually harassed, verbally and physically, by fellow students and coworkers
Cripdyke, incestuous rape at age 10, domestic sexual assault ages 21-22
Rune C. Olwen, survivor of a Catholic abuse family and repeatedly attacked since;
one of the women who invented women self-defence
Whiteman, sexually abused by father from the ages of 12-15
Rebecca G., survivor of childhood molestation from 5-7, date rape at 16 and at 17, and sexual assault by a colleague in grad school
Nepenthe, repeated partner rape at age 20
Claire D, survivor of repeated and regular rape and gang rape between the ages of 12-15 and date rape at ages 16 and 18
Kate A., survived rape at 19 & multiple assaults
Jenny W, raped at age 14
Ellid, assaulted twice by her own husband in her own home
Sarah, survivor of molestation at 3 & 5, rape at 5, and threats of sexual assault from classmates from 8-17
Aimee McDowd, survived rape at 8, 12-13 repeated molestation and rape again at 15, escaped attempted abduction at 16
Can'tSayWho, raped by friend of 10 years
Kristin, survivor of sexual assault, age 4 and 20
Cynthia Wood, groped by a teacher at 12, raped by a boyfriend at 15
Kay, raped by a partner, groped countless times
Brigitte Hentschel, raped twice, once by a casual acquaintance, once by an ex-boyfriend; sexually harassed and groped countless times
Margaret L, sexually assaulted at 13, raped by a coworker at 22
Elizabeth C., molested as a child
Sarah Rean, molested from infancy, raped at age 18, and assaulted
Michelle, sexually abused by grandfather 4-12
Juliet, sexually assaulted at age 17
Rae, stalked by someone everyone insisted was harmless until he stabbed a stranger
Dr. Dory Green, sexually assaulted at 21 by a casual acquaintance in an encolsed space after politely turning down his advances
Jessa, drugged and raped at age 12
Tamsin, sexually harassed in elementary school with the help of a teacher
Alumiere Sg, sexually abused age 13 - 17, raped as an adult
Veronica
Melissa Faulkner, sexually abused by stepfather for almost a year, age 12
mouthyb, BA, MFA, PhD (in progress), molested at age 9, raped multiple times
Allison, molested ages 13-14, raped at age 22
Sarah J., molested at age 7, assaulted in 2009
Rob, raped at ages 11-13 by a school official
Kathi, raped at age 12
Faith L., sexually assaulted at 11 and 12, raped at 16, assaulted at 18
Gayle Peterson
Jane P., sexually abused at age 6, raped at 8 and 13
Marley, raped at age 16
Heidi H., raped age age 16
Anonymouse, sexually assaulted at age 17 and groped by a college professor age 18
Demetria, survivor of sexual assault July 10, 2009
Joey Nichole Thomas, survivor of child sexual abuse between the ages of 5 & 6
Ms. Lilithe, sexually assaulted at age 6
Melissa Gay, drugged and raped at age 18
Erica Nash, sexual assaulted by acquaintances and repeatedly raped by ex-boyfriend
KateSi, raped at 18; harassed, groped frequently even now
Grace Feldmann, survivor of attempted rape at age 17 and acquaintance rape--in hotel--at gunpoint age 18
Kendra, assault and rape survivor
G Davy, assaulted at 13

By Thy Authority

Oh, look. Another preacher person is in trouble for using the authority of his position to get him some.

The woman told police that her spiritual adviser recommended she find a regular confessor in the Catholic Church so she chose Wenthe, whom she had met while attending a Catholic initiation class. She said Wenthe heard her confession at least four times, while he told police he heard her confession only one time and it was before their sexual relationship began.

According to the criminal complaint, the woman said she had been sexually abused as a child and suffered from an eating disorder. The first sexual encounter took place at Wenthe's rectory apartment after the woman had met with her counselor.

"I remember pleading with him that we should stop," the woman wrote in a 2006 letter to an archdiocese official. "He made me feel like I had done this to him and that I was obligated to finish the job."

The woman told police the sexual encounters happened about every two weeks, sometimes after mass in Wenthe's apartment or in the sacristy where priests change into their ceremonial garments. She eventually left the state to enter treatment for her eating disorder and the sexual encounters ended in February 2005.

This time, however, the priest is saying he shouldn't be in trouble for what he did.

Paul Engh, Wenthe's attorney, filed a motion arguing that the state law prohibiting a clergy member from having sex with a person who is seeking or receiving "religious or spiritual advice, aid, or comfort in private" is unconstitutional. In court records, the Ramsey County Attorney's Office said the law is constitutional and has been upheld by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

District Judge Margaret Marrinan will hear arguments from both sides Monday.

"Any minister who has sex with anybody may be in trouble under this statute," Engh said last week. "It's an overly broad attempt to regulate sexual behavior."

Right. Because priests and ministers can't possibly, say, sign up for OKCupid and take their chances like anyone else. Their situation is so very, very special that they can only have sex with the vulnerable people who come to them for help and believe they have an inside line on what God wants. They are such special snowflakes that they can't abide by the same laws every other kind of counselor or other authority is bound by. Not them.

And the answer to the problem apparently isn't to give up any of that authority either. The church is engaging in similar nail biting.

Andrew Eisenzimmer, chancellor for civil affairs with the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, said the archdiocese has not taken a position on the constitutionality of the law. He said these types of cases are complex because of the restrictions on testimony about a particular religion's practices or beliefs.

"You're asking the jury to decide when a Catholic priest is actually counseling a follower," Eisenzimmer said.

Not really. Though the law specifies that sex is prohibited when someone seeks "religious or spiritual advice, aid, or comfort in private," what the state is asking the jury to do is to determine when there is a degree of authority in a relationship that prevents a reasonable certainty of free consent.

It's a high standard, yes. However, it's the same standard that anyone else who offers care in situations that create an imbalance of power agrees to abide by. Do they always stick to this agreement? No, but they don't then challenge the legality of the agreement based on the idea that maybe they didn't have that much power. Power and authority are broadly construed for other "helping" professions. None of them seems to have this same problem with thinking this will keep them from ever having sex. They simply keep their sex and professional lives separate. Who would think it would be harder for those who claim to be experts in the problem of temptation?

It's also amusing to see Wenthe's attorney's concern for "an overly broad attempt to regulate sexual behavior." His client has nominally submitted to a much-tighter regulation of his own behavior and participates in the church's attempt to regulate everyone else's.

That Wenthe is fighting the state and not the church suggests that his problem isn't with regulating sexual behavior in general, but only with anyone who tries to regulate his. After all, the church only made him undergo treatment when they were informed of the problem in 2006. They left him all the authority that allowed him to do this in the first place.

The Value of Defiance

I'm in the middle of a migraine, and Blogger has royally pissed me off over the last couple of days. Today, I'll just point to a couple of other posts that provide context to each other. Jerry Coyne comments on the idea that a new study showing religion is globally pervasive suggests that uprooting its ideals is "hopeless":

That’s hogwash. As we can see from the tremendous secularization of the world over the past few centuries, especially in Europe, it is not impossible for religion to wither. The pervasiveness of a belief gives no warrant that that belief will be with us forever. Look how pervasive, only a century ago, was the idea that women were second-class citizens. This was true in nearly every society. Ditto for gays and ethnic minorities. And look how attitudes have changed! Granted, women, for instance, still get the short end of the stick, but in many parts of the world they’re much better off. Most of us now realize that people should be treated as equals, regardless of gender, color, and sexual orientation. That would have been inconceivable a few hundred years ago.

Let’s just tinker a bit with Trigg’s statement:

“If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature as the idea that women are inferior, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests,” Trigg said. . “The female-equality hypothesis of the 1960s—I think that is hopeless.”

So how do we go about undermining the authority of a such a pervasive idea? Paul W points out that if we really want to understand that, social science offers us a great deal of research on the topics of conformity and minority influence.

Here are some topics worth looking up on Wikipedia—Mooney should demonstrate his familiarity with this stuff if he wants to be taken at all seriously, and his critics would do well to know about the six decades of relevant research he persistently ignores:

Conformity, Asch Conformity Experiments, Normative Social Influence, Social Proof, Information Cascade, and especially Minority Influence and Spiral of Silence.

Scientists and philosophers especially are in a position to exert minority influence, ending a spiral of silence by providing social proof, and undermining the information cascade that supports religion.

But that is exactly what Mooney is most opposed to—he is against the experts voicing the kind of expert opinion that has the greatest potential for minority influence, and he actively tries to undermine the appearance of expertise and minority solidarity that makes minority influence work best. He is firmly on the side of the normative conformity that keeps the masses ignorant of the kind of minority but expert view that could actually change a substantial number of minds.

The reading and the suggestions to be derived from it aren't terribly straightforward, but this is stuff you'll want to know if you're running against the herd.

The Accommodationism Challenges

Mike McRae, Tribal Scientist, indulged me in a discussion of his goals surrounding his latest salvo in the accommodation debate.

There are frequent olive branches thrown down in request of a ceasefire. Perhaps the most common is the plea for diversity. This call seems democratic, inclusive and reasonable. After all, if there are many different problems and many different audiences, there must be a need for many different methods. Let’s all live and let live, right? If one approach doesn’t work, another will.

The mediators are somewhat like a ring species for Accommodationis warminfuzziness and Newatheist confrontationist.

Yet there is an element of intellectual laziness in this view. Of course, no one approach in communication will reach all demographics, or solve all problems. Diverse approaches are indeed necessary. Yet this is not the same as saying all approaches are necessary. Some will conflict. Some will be resource hungry and have no hope of success for one reason or another. Identifying solutions to the problem of how best to communicate science in the face of religion will take more than guessing, hoping and shouting into echo chambers. Like anything in science, it demands research, critical thinking and evaluation. No act of communication should be above criticism or beyond the need for evidence, clarity and precision.

I wanted to know why he put up a snarky post. I wanted to know why he generalized his criticisms to the group instead of making them specific to particular behaviors and people. Basically, I wanted to know why someone critiquing communication was engaging in such nonconstructive criticism. His response:

You ask what I hope to accomplish? Culture change. Encouraging atheists to see that if they want to defend their choices, those values they appreciate so much in science don’t suddenly disappear and allow them to have robust opinions based on gut feelings and wishful thinking.

Based on the rest of my conversation with Mike, I'd like to offer a set of challenges to those advocating that "New Atheists" be more accommodating of others in their communications.

Challenge 1: Decide whether this is important to you.

Is confrontation as a tactic among atheists an issue you think needs to be addressed? Will it really change the world if you can get a few people to follow your advice? Or are you annoyed by some people who have stomped on your feelings on the blogosphere?

These aren't frivolous questions. You've got work to do. They've got work to do. And change, as you already know, is hard. You should also know that if you do this wrong, you're going to entrench the bad blood over this issue even further. Every little thing you (and everyone else with any kind of platform) say on the topic goes on record these days. If you don't care enough to do this right, maybe it's time to shut up about it, at least in public.

Challenge 2: Know your audience.

Who are you trying to reach? Are you talking to published "New Atheist" authors? Are you talking to atheist groups that sponsor ad campaigns or social meetups? Are you talking to groups that lobby and pursue legal action? Are you talking to blog commenters? Are you talking to forum campers? Are you talking to unaffiliated atheists who just want religion to leave them alone?

These types of groups have very different goals. They have different tactics. They have different degrees of centrality and authority. They have different religious backgrounds and degrees of education. You have to take the time to understand them--ask them real questions and listen to the answers--if you want to know what language to speak and what problems you're going to offer to help them solve.

You also have to understand that you frequently can't address multiple groups using the same message. They're just too different. Being an atheist only gives you so much in common with other atheists. At the same time, however, any individual atheist may belong to many of these groups. You're never going to have the luxury of addressing just one set of concerns at a time, and you're going to have to go to extraordinary lengths to keep from generalizing between groups based on the cross-group memberships of certain individuals.

Challenge 3: Learn to see privilege.

Being an atheist won't get you killed very often. In many environments, being an atheist is entirely invisible. In some, it's perfectly respectable. That does not put atheists on par with the religious. Unless you understand where the differences are, you will never be able to effectively address the concerns of atheists.

Read a privilege checklist or two. Understand what it means to have an area of your life that you choose to keep hidden because there are consequences of doing otherwise. Understand what it means to be watched for signs that you represent a degenerate type. Understand how much time and energy it takes to answer questions whenever you identify yourself. Understand how much it takes to run constant calculations on whether to go with the flow or upset the social order. Understand what it means to watch people take the time to decide whether they really knew you at all when you come out. Understand what it means to hear political debates on whether you're ruining modern life.

Only once you get all that can you actually understand what you're asking otherwise.

Challenge 4: Recognize the limits of your own expertise.

There is a fair body of cognitive science having to do with communication. It doesn't begin to approach the complexity of real-world (meatspace and electronic) communications. There is a lot of information to be had from these studies, but this is a very new science, given the size of the topic. It can only tell us so much.

One of the things it can and has told us is that the power, privilege and out-group status of the speaker have an effect on how the speaker's message is received. We know that whether we are trusted or even heard as speakers is often largely out of our hands. What we don't know, what cognitive science, or at least those presenting the cognitive science, has yet to tell us despite our very real need for the information, is how to overcome this problem.

Until that happens, asking people to understand the cognitive science is reasonable. Asking people to replace current behavior is not. Confrontational tactics for minority groups may not be supported in the cognitive science literature, but neither are they shown to be worse than any other tactics for minority groups. In the presence of privilege, we simply don't expect any communication tactic to have a high rate of success. (Legal tactics, on the other hand....)

Meanwhile, there are other disciplines that do suggest the confrontational approach has merit. The history of social movements is plastered with groups taking approaches that make people feel uncomfortable and threatened. It is also plastered with groups succeeding with approaches that make people feel uncomfortable and threatened. And frankly, familiarity with this sort of social history shows just how mild "confrontational" atheists of the current sort are by comparison.

Even if you aren't concerned with social change directly, recognize that attacking the privilege problem directly is a communication tactic with the potential to succeed. Privilege gets in the way of effective communication. We can go around this with the appropriate tools when cognitive science gives them to us. Until then, we can do our best to go through.

Challenge 5: Recognize others' work and expertise.

This is the point where I tell you to drop the word "but" from your vocabulary. Atheists, even highly annoying ones (whichever set that may be for you), have made major accomplishments in the past couple of decades. Best-selling books, wide blog readerships, social mobilization for political action, communities that support out atheists and those who have left religious communities, successful events at the regional to international level, cogent social criticism, historical scholarship, increased visibility of abuses of power despite a hobbled press.

Is there crap being produced as well? Of course. Sturgeon's Law. That doesn't make the accomplishments I just mentioned any less real.

It also doesn't exempt anyone from the requirement to deal with the accomplished as, at the very least, people with as much to teach as you believe they have to learn. The lessons they have to teach may well include the fact that what they do is so more difficult than it appears on the surface--requiring extraordinary timing, wordsmithery, and humor--that most people may as well not try. You'll never learn it if your approach is to say, "Yeah, they wrote a best-selling book, but it's only because...."

Challenge 6: Offer something better.

The problem of addressing religious privilege while simultaneously working around the bald fact that the religious hold most of the political power is tough. It's ugly. Nobody who is trying to do both thinks it's simple. Your final challenge is to deal with the real difficulty of that problem.

However, the people who are tackling that work aren't going to be lured by a message that is, in essence, "Ignore the privilege problem in order to solve problems that require political power." Privilege is power. Your audience knows that solving individual political problems while allowing the privilege to persist is fighting a hydra. Offering a sharper sword only makes the heads multiply faster.

However, offer the equivalent of a torch, and you've got something. If you want to shape how atheists communicate, figure out how to offer them something that undermines religious privilege at the same time.

No, I don't know what that is either. All I know is that if you offer something short of that, you're offering less than what atheists ultimately want and need, and that won't work. That's why you need to decide up front how important this is to you. That's why it's a challenge.

Standing on Aether, Thinking Airy Thoughts

Or, Theology as Pseudophilosophy

There's been a rash of criticism lately of New Atheists (or Gnu Atheists, popular atheists, internet atheists, outspoken atheists, non-invisible atheists--whatever term makes the writer comfortable that he's not being prejudicial while generalizing for paragraphs on end) that we're being anti-intellectual and displaying our lack of education by not grappling seriously with serious philosophy of religion. Everything used to be so much better and it's all terribly concerning according to Michael Ruse:

Perhaps it is just a turf war, but I don’t think philosophy is something to be ignored or done after a day’s work in the lab over a few beers in the faculty club. I think if you want to show that science and religion are inherently in contradiction, then you should show why people like Kuhn (and indeed Foucault) are wrong about the nature of science. That I think is morally wrong, namely taking positions with major political and social implications, without doing your serious homework. Just mentioning Galileo’s troubles with the Church or Thomas Henry Huxley’s debate with the Bishop of Oxford is no true substitute for hard thinking.

Jacques Berlinerblau:

In fact, what is fascinating about the New Atheists is their almost complete lack of interest in the history and philosophical development of atheism. They seem not the least bit curious to venture beyond an understanding that reduces atheist thought to crude hyper-empiricism, hyper-materialism, and an undiscriminating anti-theism.

And R. Joseph Hoffmann:

The old atheism was full of cranks and angry old men, but some of them were clever. Many of them (as my grandmother used to say) knew a thing or two. The big distinction between the old and the new is that the old atheism depended on a narrative, based in philosophy, and linked itself to a long tradition of rational decision-making. Not choosing to believe in God was an act of deliberation, not a foregone conclusion. At its best, it was studious and reflective.

Repeating a message in this way can be a very powerful thing. It can, in fact, make one deal with the message in a serious way. However, not all messages benefit from the serious treatment. This is one message that doesn't.

Jerry Coyne makes some excellent points about the difference between understanding history and getting stuck repeating it endlessly instead of moving forward. If the majority of us can't build on what our forebears knew, while leaving the details of exactly how they figured it out to those who like that sort of thing, we'll get nowhere.

We don't criticize farmers for not being socially conversant in biochemistry, although biochemistry underlies what they do. Nor, more importantly, can we legitimately exclude farmers from criticizing biological or biochemical theorizing--if their criticism is that the theories involved rely on faulty understanding of farming.

One of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is that it operates from faulty premises. Some of those faulty premises come from misunderstandings of the scientific process (e.g., not understanding the importance of good controls), but some come from misunderstandings of the subject being studied. Experiments in telepathy depend, in both the design and analysis phases, on the idea that communication is verbal and unambiguous (as well as the idea that humans are honest). Experiments in astrology rely on the idea that humans are internally consistent and externally different. Experiments in alternative treatments for the common cold rely on the idea that the condition is not self-limiting.

Theorizing on the causality of autism spectrum disorders frequently assumes that historical increases in diagnoses reflect a real change in the neurology of a population. Those studying the relative intelligence of the black, white, and oriental races assume that those are valid biological categories and that their measurement instruments are valid proxies for genetic differences. Too many experiments in evolutionary psychology assume "human universals" can be determined by studying undergraduate psychology students or industrialized populations and that social structures aren't self-maintaining in the absence of underlying genetics.

To extrapolate, pseudoscience is often a process of deciding that something needs to be explained without first checking to see whether an explanation already exists. All the rigorous design, careful statistical analysis, and flawless logic in the world can't help you produce good results if your premises are faulty. Biochemists can do all the meticulous work they want on how a particular type of bacteria present in a field breaks down pig manure and liberates nitrogen, but if the field under study only ever sees cow manure, the results are going to be meaningless. At that point, it becomes pseudoscience just as much as if the work itself were shoddy.

Philosophy is different than science, of course. That doesn't mean, though, that pseudophilosophy isn't just as important a concept to understand as pseudoscience is. And as with pseudoscience, the problems of pseudophilosophy don't only happen when someone screws up the process by, say, falling prey to a fallacy. They can just as easily happen in the process of formulating questions.

There may be no stupid questions (except for the one you ask again because you didn't listen to the answer last time), but there are bad questions. "Why is a hummingbird?" is a bad question. It isn't a bad subject, but the question, as posed, won't get you the answers you want except by chance.

"What do hummingbirds all have in common?" "How are hummingbirds different from other birds?" "Why do we call them hummingbirds?" "What is the evolutionary history of hummingbirds?" "Where do hummingbirds live?" "Why do hummingbirds capture our imagination?" "What would happen if hummingbirds disappeared?" "What about my backyard is attracting hummingbirds?" "Why does that piece of expressionist art suggest a hummingbird when it's not remotely realistic?" All those and plenty more are questions that produce answers that increase our knowledge, about us, about our world, and about hummingbirds.

They also reflect our knowledge of the world. "Why is a hummingbird?" is a question that might have been seriously asked at one time. The answer would have been (in the form of a poem or essay) that the rapidly beating wings of a hummingbird demonstrate some lesson about work and life or that the creature is simply too beautiful to not exist. Answers then assumed that "why" was a question of existence or nonexistence.

As our knowledge of evolution and ecology has broadened, "why" has given way to questions of this organism or feature instead of that, this location or function instead of another. As our understanding of perception and cognition has developed, "why" has become a question of identification and classification.

The "why" that is a question of existence is met with "Why not?" Creatures exist in numbers and with a degree of diversity that we cannot count. We can only estimate. That one more exists is not a matter of surprise requiring explanation, although its individual characteristics might be. We question why one would ask the question.

The same goes for religious philosophy. We are being told we should respect the serious work done by philosophers on these fundamental questions. Instead, we look at what we know of the world around us and ask why anyone is asking. Can the questions that made sense when religious philosophy mediated between competing ideas still produce any answers with meaning today, when religious philosophy is being used to defend its own existence in a world that continually reveals its secrets to us?

Michael Ruse thinks we must grapple today with "Does a creator god exist?" because someone else once did. Instead, we look at our universe and ask what "creation" would even mean in this context. When we understand that we don't know whether our universe has always existed, whether time is a meaningful concept outside the bounds of our universe, whether our universe is the only one, it is perfectly valid to look askance at those who assume creation in order to ask about gods. When we know from our scientific pursuits that humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize, it is important to demonstrate not just that the question can be asked, but that it can lead to a meaningful answer.

The same goes for the "special place of humans" and "eternal salvation." The idea that human exceptionalism is any more valid than hummingbird exceptionalism cannot be taken for granted. Claims to the contrary require privileging one's own frame of reference over all others. Until those who apply vast amounts of logic to the "problem" can make a convincing case that their question is more important than the question of the "special place of bacteria," they haven't demonstrated that their work is worth my respect. Neither has anyone who mistakes unsupported dualism for a philosophical question in desperate need of an answer.

Until these questions are phrased in ways that reflect what science has taught us about the world, all the philosophical work done on them may be perfectly logical and rigorous, but it still hasn't established that it isn't pseudophilosophy, grand edifices built atop faulty questions. Until it has, it hasn't demonstrated that it's worthy of our time, our attention, and our respect.

There is nothing remotely ignorant or anti-intellectual about the demand that we be shown that questions formed in more ignorant times remain meaningful given our increasing knowledge of the world. There is nothing at all unserious about our requests for evidence that these questions are demanding answers. And equating those demands to anti-intellectualism, lack of curiosity, and tempter tantrums...well, let's just say it doesn't display any will to engage with current atheist intellectual traditions.

Juniper Rants

Juniper Shoemaker is a very busy woman. She's working on her biomedical PhD while filling in the gaps that an B.A. in English will leave in one's science education. Plus she's got her own set of personal challenges she's meeting at the same time. I admire that woman beyond words.

And oh, the words. She doesn't have a lot of time to blog, but when she does, or even when she leaves a comment somewhere, she is always worth reading. Her latest blog post is no exception.

Juniper is tired. Yes, I know. She's a grad student, but even here, she's remarkable. You see, it isn't so much the lab hours or the academic load that's leaving her exhausted. Juniper's tired because she's continually dealing with people who can't or won't think outside their own circumstances, even when their own experience gives them the tools to do just that.

I'm tired of white feminists who don't give a damn about bigotry against black people even as they're castigating "the black community", which doesn't fucking exist, for not giving a damn about bigotry against gays and lesbians. No, wait. It's more specific than that. I'm tired of white feminists who refuse to condemn bigotry against black people with the same compassion and attentiveness with which they condemn bigotry, namely sexism, against white women. In order to get taken seriously, I must confine myself to discussions of explicit statements of bigotry against black people, but you don't have to do the same when it comes to bigotry against white women? You get to talk about "context", "tone" and "implication", but I don't? You're capable of developing a nuanced understanding of manifestations of sexism against white women, but you still think that my anger and hurt and frustration are only legitimate if they're in response to cartoonishly overt manifestations of racism against blacks?

And this:

I'm tired of the idea that you have to be indifferent to an issue in order to skeptically evaluate it. By the way, why does this rule never seem to apply to skeptics who crow fervently about their opposition to "political correctness"-- whatever the hell that is-- and who eagerly accept every sensationalist claim ever made by someone styling himself as an evolutionary psychologist? Why does this rule only seem to apply to "liberal" skeptics, skeptics who are angry about sexism against women and skeptics who are angry about racism against brown people? Anyway, this idea is poppycock. It is entirely possible to fairly and skeptically evaluate an argument while simultaneously harboring intense feelings about the issue in question. There is even a neurological, not a sociological, hypothesis that the brain's ability to generate emotions is inextricable from its ability to logically evaluate the world. Moreover, you are fucking insulting me by asking me to be indifferent towards questions such as "Are blacks really dumber than whites?" By ignoring my efforts to treat all questions as worthy of investigation and support intellectual and academic freedom in favor of condemning me for so much as one quiver of my mouth, you are being hypocritical, you are being irrational, you are being breathtakingly cruel, and you are insulting me to the very bone.

This. Because the idea that those in the majority don't have any stake in these questions is ridiculous. Because thinking so is a marker of an idea that hasn't been even superficially examined, much less had real critical analysis turned on it. Because the people who talk like this ignore the analysis presented to them in favor of whining that their territory is being invaded and their freedoms threatened. Because the position that the burden of proof lies with the social minority to show that cultural context is behind the poor treatment they receive is just an appeal to tradition, and one generally made from an extremely limited viewpoint.

Because no one should feel "surrounded by an abject lack of introspection," invisible, worthless, alone, particularly not Juniper.

Storm

Because there are a few people who read this blog who wouldn't find this any other way. And really, that would be a shame.

Skepticism Is a "How," Not a "Who"

On Thursday, I noted the attempt of certain proponents of evolutionary psychology (specifically that dealing with matters of gender and sexuality) to position themselves as skeptics resisting the dogmatic pressures of societal group think. I contrasted that with actual, procedural analysis of evolutionary psychology practices and claims. I also documented how one set of researchers is spending time selectively looking into evolutionarily adaptive reasons for behavior, when we already know that behavior looks much like other behavior with no reasonable adaptive value. (Yes, that's vague. The post itself it much less so. I promise.)

I wrote all this in the context of a web page and email that the CFI Michigan put out promoting a lecture by one of the researchers I critiqued, hosted by a local student group. Then I ended the post with this sentence: "That is what makes it disappointing that CFI Michigan has chosen to uncritically promote his work."

The objections have been interesting, both to my post and to Bug Girl's post at Skepchick, which is a rantier take on the same topic. I covered the discussion of the science on Friday.

Now we come to my single sentence about Michigan CFI, which has produced its own interesting responses. Two people from the group commented on my post, one of whom also commented at Skepchick. One of these invoked his title with CFI Michigan, lending his comments here official weight (whether intended or not). A note was posted to Facebook as well by another member, where it generated several comments and a signed response from the group's president. The Reasonable Doubt podcast reposted that note, where it generated even more comments. And one of the CFI Michigan officials who commented here made a (public) snarky comment on her Facebook profile (which is used for skeptical networking) about being as rational as we claim to be and "liked" a comment using the term "femi-nazi" and suggesting that rape is "too emotional" a topic for some people to handle.

You can catch all the drama aspects at Jason's post at Lousy Canuck. I'm generally going to lump it all together in this post under the umbrella of "unprofessionalism," because I want to focus on the promotion of skepticism and critical thought. According to their About page, this is also an area of focus of CFI Michigan.

The purpose of Center for Inquiry | Michigan is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.

Center for Inquiry (CFI) is an international, nonpartisan, nonprofit 501©(3) organization that encourages evidence-based inquiry into science, pseudoscience, medicine and health, religion, ethics, secularism, and society. The Center for Inquiry is not affiliated with, nor does it promote, any political party or political ideology.

Through education, research, publishing, and social services, CFI seeks to present affirmative alternatives based on scientific naturalism. The Center is also interested in providing rational ethical alternatives to the reigning paranormal and religious systems of belief, and in developing communities where like-minded individuals can meet and share experiences.

There is also a statement on this page about the calendar that brought Shackeford's talk to Bug Girl's attention, and then to mine.

We host numerous educational and social events throughout Michigan. Our events are open to the public. Visit the Event Calendar to learn about upcoming events.

Event topics include: science, religion, philosophy, social issues, politics, atheism, humanism, agnosticism, skepticism, deism, evolution, morality and ethics, secularism, rationalism, psychology, and others.

That is the sum total of CFI Michigan's contextual statements on the purposes of their calendar. They host events on topics that are associated with their mission in a positive way. It's little wonder that Bug Girl was originally confused over who was hosting Shackelford's talk. And this would be the answer to Jennifer Beahan's question at Skepchick:

How is it okay for you to say “my views are NOT the views of Skepchick, or the other writers, hence the edits above” …

But, when I say “CFI does NOT endorse the views or research of Dr. Shackelford” – that’s not okay. How is that any different?

The difference, of course, is that Bug Girl's disclaimer is attached to the original post. Jennifer's disclaimer only appears where anyone is already being critical of Shackelford. There also seems to be some confusion about the official position of CFI Michigan on Shackelford's work, given the statement from the executive director:

We respect and value Dr. Shackelford and his work, and his role as a faculty adviser to the Atheists at Oakland University student group. I have previously invited Dr. Shackelford to speak to CFI and he was unable because of scheduling conflicts. We welcome the opportunity to host a talk with him when schedules align.

There may be some distinction between not endorsing his research and making a statement about respecting and valuing his work, but I'm not sure what it is. At this point, we appear to have gone from passive uncritical promotion to active endorsement, whether that was the intent or not.

The difference between intent and actions was a big part of my discussion with Jason Pittman, Advisory Board Chair in the comments as well. Jason objected, at length, to my single sentence quoted at the start of this post. His position:

Stephanie, we have encouraged and facilitated criticism of Dr. Shackelford simply by promoting the event. CFI has provided info about the event so that you and others can provide the criticism. Your post about Dr. Shackelford proves my point. We promoted the event. You have provided criticism. When we promote an event, we are encouraging critical thinkers to attend (sometimes to the detriment of the speaker at said event!) Skeptical criticism of ideas is what CFI is all about.

It's...an interesting thought. There's just one little problem with it. As I pointed out to Jason, there is nothing about the CFI Michigan website, the calendar item, or the email promoting the event that would look any different if they were intending everyone to take Shackelford's work and word as gospel. Why? According to Jason, CFI just acts as a conduit to match up skeptics with material about which they can be skeptical ("We provide a forum for people to address controversial topics and our audiences are extremely critical.").

Let's unpack the assumptions required for Jason's statement to work in this context.

• The CFI Michigan website and email list reach people who understand CFI's intent in promoting events and speakers.
• The CFI Michigan website and email list reach people who have the tools and knowledge to effectively challenge speakers.

I've covered most of the first point already, but I'll add one thing. The people who receive these emails sign up at events or through other skeptical organizations. However, the simplest way to get on the list is to provide your email address through the same website that includes the misleading description of the events calendar. There is a high likelihood that both the website and the email reach people who have no idea what's meant to be going on. They reached at least one already.

To address the second assumption, I'll note that I'm not on that list. My participation in this discussion is a fluke, brought about because Bug Girl was thoroughly frustrated with the lack of responsiveness from CFI Michigan. It's also only because of Bug Girl that my post ended up anywhere that CFI Michigan members would see it. She posted it to their Facebook page. Counting on a situation like that--a highly motivated recipient who knows someone familiar with the scientific literature on a topic--is a bit of a stretch in terms of organizational planning. Also, given CFI Michigan officials' unprofessionalism and retrenchment in response, I wouldn't count on it happening again.

While I'm sure there are plenty of members of CFI Michigan who have excellent critical thinking skills and who are wise in the ways of argument, that simply isn't enough. You also need good information. This is a problem that becomes noticeable any time you're dealing with topics that haven't been hashed over by skeptics for ages. Critical thinking can't cut it without information. When it tries, we get James Randi being very publicly wrong on climate change. We get Lawrence Krauss suggesting that guessing the age of girls he saw with his friend is enough to tell that his friend is innocent of having sex with trafficked, underage hookers. We get Penn and Teller having to retract the claim that there's no connection between secondhand smoke and cancer. We get Brian Dunning repeating DDT chestnuts in a skeptical podcast.

It just doesn't work, no matter your skeptical credentials or pedigree. You can't "do" skepticism without knowledge of your topic. So CFI Michigan can have all the critical thinkers it wants. Unless those critical thinkers are provided with information about the subject of rape and background on the questions and disagreements in the field, they have no way of evaluating a speaker on the topic. That is particularly true with this speaker, whose research relies on an incomplete understanding of the topic. No one can train critical thinking on information the speaker, host, and promoters don't provide them.

A good example of this came up at the event itself. A comment from someone who attended:

As someone who has just participated in the event, I wish to point out that whether or not someone is swayed by his arguments, we must at least take his data into account. Shackleford acknowledges that there are limitations in his studies; he also acknowledges rightly that just because we study something that is deplorable does not mean we endorse the act. Somehow, people always seem to forget that. Studying rape as it happens, and looking for an explanation, is not the same as justifying it

This completely misses the actual objections to Shackelford's work. It isn't that people don't want him following the evidence. The problem is that he is following only those tiny bits of the evidence that point the direction he wants to go. If he were following all the evidence, he'd be headed somewhere else. But CFI Michigan's promotion of the event, made with an assumption that somehow effective criticism would just happen because they were CFI Michigan, left people unable to do more than nod at the line they were handed.

If that weren't enough, the treatment of a reasonable criticism as a personal attack left those affiliated with CFI Michigan apparently feeling that the right thing to do was support their friends rather than pay attention to the real, scientific criticisms Bug Girl and I both offered. None of the postings on Facebook engendered any engagement with our points, just comments like, "Well, just as we are expected to clear all speech and art with Muslims first to avoid giving them offense I guess the Skepchicks also feel they deserve a veto over ideas. An important lesson to remember - it isn't just right wingers who dislike freedom of speech."

That's not how you promote reason on a topic. I stand by my original statement.

Skepticism and Rape Adaptations

It isn't terribly difficult to find well-written, skeptical pieces on evolutionary psychology. In fact, several have come out quite recently. They examine current evo psych theorizing in the light of scientific requirements for proof of any such theory.

Kate Clancy wrote a post on the variety of human behavior that evo psych studies attempt to represent by using mostly college undergraduate research subjects. In addition to her concern over undergraduates' WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) demographics, she notes other ways in which these research participants aren't representative of the whole of humanity they're being used to study:

Another problem is that most work on relationships in EP tends to be heteronormative, meaning that they think nothing of assuming that either everyone is straight, or the universally best behavioral strategy is to be straight. They also tend to assume that the best strategy is to be monogamous, with occasional sneaky infidelity permitted if one can get better genes or more offspring that way (keep in mind that there is a difference between what might be biologically advantageous in a certain context, and what is culturally appropriate – the argument here is not against the culture of monogamy).

But heterosexual monogamy is only one reproductive strategy of many that humans employ. Depending on how you measure it, monogamy and polygyny (single male, multi female marriage) vie for the most frequent strategy – in fact, polygyny occurs in about 80% of modern human societies (Murdock and White 1969). There are even a few rare populations that practice polyandry, which is the marriage of a single female and multiple males. And, even in those populations where monogamy is practiced, serial monogamy is far more frequent than lifetime monogamy: this means that individuals have a series of monogamous relationships rather than find one mate for life (so no, divorce is not a modern human invention).

And that's not even getting into the nonhuman primates with whom we share a fair amount of evolutionary history. In short, Clancy makes the case that if we wish to describe a behavior as evolutionarily adaptive in humans as a whole, we need to consider more than a subset of the behavior in a single culture.

Also looking at the challenges that evo psych must meet in order to scientifically determine the adaptive value of a behavior is Jeremy Yoder. In a multipart series examining the evidence that homophobia is an evolved trait, he breaks down the multiple lines of evidence required:

When evolutionary biologists say a trait or behavior is "adaptive," we mean that the trait or behavior is the way we see it now because natural selection has made it that way. That is, the trait or behavior is heritable, or passed down from parent to child more-or-less intact; and having it confers fitness benefits, or some probability of producing more offspring than folks who lack the trait. Lots of people, including some evolutionary biologists, speculate about the adaptive value of all sorts of traits—but in the absence of solid evidence for heritability or fitness benefits, such speculation tends to get derided as "adaptive storytelling."

A few particularly interesting points were brought up in these posts. One, which should be obvious but often seems not to be, is that evo psych is talking about biological mechanisms for behavior, which means that a demonstration that the behavior is widespread is not enough to support claims that a behavior is evolved.

To recap: Gallup proposed that homophobia could be adaptive if it prevented gay and lesbian adults from contacting a homophobic parent's children and—either through actual sexual abuse or some nebulous "influence," making those children homosexual. In support of this, he published some survey results [$a] showing that straight people were uncomfortable with adult homosexuals having contact with children.

I pointed out that all Gallup did was document the existence of a common stereotype about homosexuals—he presents no evidence that believing this stereotype can actually increase fitness via the mechanism he proposes, or that it is heritable.

The next item of interest didn't come from Yoder, but from Jesse Bering, who wrote the article to which Yoder was responding. Bering described his affection for research that is done "without curtseying to the court of public opinion." Yoder points out that a study providing a rationale for homophobia didn't exactly run counter to public opinion in 1983, when it was done.

Later, in a response to Yoder's first post, plus those of others, Gallup himself suggests that his critics "tip-toe around the fact that my approach is based on a testable hypothesis" and "go out of their way to side-step the fact that the data we’ve collected are consistent with the predictions" because the hypothesis is "politically incorrect or contrary to prevailing social dogma." Given that Yoder specifically discussed the relevance of his data to his theory, it's difficult to award Gallup the mantle of abused maverick he and Bering both claim for him.

Earlier this year, Jerry Coyne wrote (in response to another Bering article), a caution about building strong evo psych edifices on slim foundations. In this case, he examined the idea of the "rape module"--a genetic, inherited predisposition among human men to commit rape--and of specific, genetically programmed, inheritable behaviors in women designed to avoid this "rape module."

Well, one can debate whether reading a story about rape is the same thing as being sexually assaulted, or whether a marginal increase in handgrip strength would have been sufficient in our ancestors to fight off a rapist. But the important part of these studies is that they were apparently one-offs—they have not, as far as I know, been replicated by other researchers. Do we accept single results, based on surveys of American undergraduates at a single university, as characterizing all modern women?

As we know, many studies in science, when repeated, fail to replicate the initial results. Think of all the reports of single genes for homosexuality, depression, and other behavioral traits that fell apart when researchers tested those results on other groups of people! And if an author did an initial study (not a replication) of handgrip strength that didn’t show the relationship with ovulation, would that even be publishable? I think not.

I suggest, then, that the results of evolutionary psychology often reflect ascertainment bias. If you find a result that comports with the idea that a trait is “adaptive,” it gets published. If you don’t, it doesn’t. That leads to the literature being filled with positive results, and gives the public a false idea of the strength of scientific data supporting the evolutionary roots of human behavior.

In addition to critiquing the studies themselves, Coyne also notes that this is not the first time the "rape module" idea has been criticized.

Thornhill and Palmer’s book was controversial, with many critics claiming that the authors were trying to excuse or justify rape. Bering takes after these critics, properly noting that “‘adaptive’”does not mean ‘justifiable’,” but rather only mechanistically viable.” But what he doesn’t mention is that there were strong scientific critiques of the “rape module” idea as well. I produced two of them myself, a long one in The New Republic and a short one with Andrew Berry in Nature, pointing out not only scientific weaknesses in the evolutionary scenario but Thornhill and Palmer’s unsavory fiddling with statistics, distorting what the primary data on sexual assault really said. Bering doesn’t mention the scientific controversy, noting only that “it’s debatable that a rape module lurks in the male brain.”

The New Republic article is itself a strong skeptical look at the science used to bolster the concept of the "rape module." I recommend reading it in its entirety. Coyne discusses the various versions of the idea that rape is a product of evolution (one trivially vague enough to be meaningless--but intuitively acceptable--and one stronger and requiring proportionally more evidence) and how they are played against each other in such a way that they could describe any evidence. He also applies a broader understanding of crime to provide alternate explanations that don't require a biological predisposition to explain patterns of victimization, and he explains how the evidence in three studies used depend on statistical manipulation. He also examines claims that rape can only be prevented properly using an evo psych framework for understanding it.

Given the availability of people like these, with the tools and inclination to turn a skeptical eye on the topic of evolutionary psychology, it is perhaps no surprise that Center for Inquiry Michigan is promoting a speaker tomorrow night on the topic of evo psych and rape. What is surprising, however, is the identity of the chosen speaker. Dr. Todd Shackelford is the director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at Oakland University.

Dr. Shackleford will present a talk on the competing theories of rape as a specialized rape adaptation or as a by-product of other psychological adaptations. Although increasing number of sexual partners is a proposed benefit of rape according to the "rape as an adaptation" and the "rape as a by-product" hypotheses, neither hypothesis addresses directly why some men rape their long-term partners, to whom they already have sexual access. He will present the findings of two studies that examined these hypotheses, discuss the limitations of this research and highlight future directions for research on sexual coercion in intimate relationships.

Now, the problem is not that Dr. Shackelford is an evo psych researcher. There are people doing good work in evo psych. The problem is that Dr. Shackelford isn't doing good work on this topic. In particular, the work he is presenting, relating female infidelity to rape of female partners by male partners, doesn't tell us anything that the already robust scientific literature on rape hasn't already told us.

In the 2006 paper that Shackelford will be presenting tomorrow, "Sexual Coercion and Forced In-Pair Copulation as Sperm Competition Tactics in Humans," (pdf available) Goetz and Shackelford demonstrate a correlation in heterosexual couples between the likelihood of female infidelity (past or present, rated by the male or female partner) and the likelihood of male sexual coercion, up to and including rape via physical assault. This isn't news. We already know that men who endorse rape myths and the acceptability of sexual violence against women under certain circumstances are more likely to rape. One of the common attitudes that predicts rape is that "sluts" lose the right to say, "No." ("Nice girls don't get raped.") Non-monogamy is used to excuse rape, and not merely rape by prior sexual partners.

Non-monogamy also isn't alone among excuses for rape (Scully and Marolla, 2005, pdf available). The idea that women secretly want the sex is common. Rapists claim that the circumstances of the rape were beyond their control due to drugs, alcohol, or emotional problems. People see demands for sex as more reasonable in circumstances where financial contributions to a date or relationship are uneven. None of these, however, are examined whether they similarly contribute to rape within an existing relationship. Without that, the 2006 paper tells us nothing about whether potential female infidelity triggers "sperm competition tactics."

Nor is this Shackelford's only study that ignores our broader knowledge of crime in a way that selectively supports evo psych explanations for violence against women. In the 2002 paper, "Understanding Domestic Violence Against Women: Using Evolutionary Psychology to Extend the Feminist Functional Analysis," (pdf available) Peters, Shackelford, and Buss note the trend toward fewer domestic assaults of post-menopausal women as support that domestic assault is evolutionarily selected as a means of controlling fertile women. They do this using New York City police incident reports for assaults against women only.

They don't use data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, despite the fact that they cite the survey in the paper. Nor do the results for female victims don't look substantially different than those they do use. From the NCVS:


Then there is the NCVS data for males:


There are fewer assaults overall, but the pattern isn't much different. In fact, the pattern isn't much different if you look at other types of crimes, either.


Given this information (the report on the age of crime victims dates to 1997), the challenge isn't to explain why the rates of domestic assault fall off near menopause, but to explain what is common to all crime experienced by females in the U.S. that produces that age curve, whether the crime is sexually motivated or not. This study, by again ignoring the data on the broader topic, fails to tell us anything about what it purports to be studying.

In order to actually present a skeptical view of a topic, it is not enough to assert, as some evo psych advocates do, that yours is the minority viewpoint or not widely accepted. That is simple contrarianism. Skepticism and honest inquiry require that one deal with all the information available on the topic. They also require that we not use the absence of information that would allow us to choose between explanations to argue for only one of these explanations.

The studies produced on this topic by Dr. Shackelton don't meet either criteria. That is what makes it disappointing that CFI Michigan has chosen to uncritically promote his work. [ETA: This topic is discussed at some length in the comments. They're worth reading.]

Citations

Goetz, A., & Shackelford, T. (2006). Sexual coercion and forced in-pair copulation as sperm competition tactics in humans Human Nature, 17 (3), 265-282 DOI: 10.1007/s12110-006-1009-8

Peters J, Shackelford TK, & Buss DM (2002). Understanding domestic violence against women: using evolutionary psychology to extend the feminist functional analysis. Violence and victims, 17 (2), 255-64 PMID: 12033558