The Bystander Effect, Long Version

You know me; I’m a big believer in reusing good work. That’s why I’ll post some of my school papers on here from time to time. If they’re decent and relevant, I’ll share them on here since it’ll save me the time of writing a new post on the topic. As usual, please make excuses for the fact that this was written for a class and a grade, so it’s not quite my style. I tried editing it, but that turned out to be more trouble than it’s worth. It’s also been a while since my last post. I’ve been really busy with work and school. Lots of reading and tests and busy work. As always, comments are strongly encouraged!!

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How the Field of Heuristics and Biases Can Save Lives: The Bystander Effect

On an early Sunday morning in April of 2010, 32 year-old Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was stabbed in New York City while coming to the aid of a woman being attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. This act of heroism was not met in kind. Tale-Yax bled to death near the intersection of 144^th and 88^th for almost an hour and a half before medical personnel from the fire department appeared at the scene. He was already dead before they arrived. The most tragic part of this story, and the most baffling to many, is that roughly 25 people walked passed this man as he lay dying on the sidewalk. No one offered him help or even troubled to ask if he was alright. What could possibly explain this behavior? Is this an isolated incident of public inaction? Let’s look at another story before we try to answer these questions.

On March 13 1964, 28 year old Kitty Genovese was on her way back to her Queens apartment from work at 3am. Though she parked her car less than 100 feet from her apartment, she was attacked on the short walk and was stabbed to death by a serial rapist and murderer. The incident is too gruesome to describe in detail, but it is important to take a look at some aspects of it so we can have a better understanding of why this is such an important case. According to newspaper accounts following the incident, the attack lasted for at least a half an hour during which time Genovese screamed and pleaded for help. The murderer attacked Genovese and stabbed her, then fled the scene after attracting the attention of a neighbor. The killer then returned ten minutes later and inflicted a second set of injuries that proved fatal. The most shocking detail of this story is that a reported number of about three dozen of her neighbors either witnessed or heard the assault, and no one intervened or phoned the police.

Again, what happened here? Are American cities creating citizens that are so full of apathy and lacking of empathy that they won’t even trouble themselves to pick up a phone when someone is getting murdered in front of them? That’s what the New York Times concluded on the front cover of their March 27^th issue of the same year. The incident was characterized as strong evidence of the failures of modern American society. However, two social psychologists working in the area at the time, Bibb Latané and John Darley, were unconvinced that the inaction of the witnesses was the result of lack of empathy. They set about investigating some of the other factors that could have played a role in this incident and their results are some of the most popular findings in all of social psychology and can be found in virtually every textbook on social psychology. Through their experiments, they concluded that the reason that no one helped when there were so many people around was precisely because of the fact that there were so many people around. These two researches had identified a phenomenon called the Bystander Effect.

Let’s change gears for a moment to take time to better understand the context. In his 2005 TED talk, ‘Why We Make Bad Decisions’, Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert discusses some of the reliable failures of human thinking. Gilbert shows, through examples like the purchasing of lottery tickets, that people’s decision making can’t be explained by any simple rational formula. This fact explains much of human behavior, not just our nonsensical impulse to waste money on lottery tickets. This ties in perfectly with the work of another psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman is an Israeli American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is made famous for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology with his colleague, Amos Tversky. Kahneman and Tversky explained human decision making better than ever before with their joint work on what is called Prospect Theory. Prospect theory explains why people buy lottery tickets, are afraid of terrorists, and many other previously incomprehensible failures of rational judgment.

There is a growing field in psychology, which Tversky and Kahneman essentially created, which studies heuristics and biases. A cognitive bias is a replicable pattern of poor decision making that often stems from a particular situation. This differs from a heuristic in that the latter is a mental shortcut that can often be helpful, but leads to poor judgment under certain circumstances. To illustrate the difference, I’ll give a famous example of each. Confirmation bias is the notable tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. For a real-life example, look no further than political ads and see how both sides of the race interpret and present things like job statistics. For a popular heuristic, take the Availability Heuristic: the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are, or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be. To illustrate this, try estimating the proportion of words that begin with the letter “R” or “K” versus those words that have the letter “R” or “K” in the third position. Most English-speaking people could immediately think of many words that begin with the letters “R” or “K” , but it would take a more concentrated effort to think of any words where “R” or “K” is the third letter (strip, cart, burrow, ask); your immediate answer was probably that words that begin with “R” or “K” are more common. The reality is that words that have the letter “R” or “K” in the third position are more common. In fact, there are three times as many words that have the letter “K” in the third position, as have it in the first position.

So how does this tie into the cases of Kitty Genovese and Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax and the bystander effect? I’m arguing that the bystander effect is the result of another widely used heuristic, social proof. In his book Influence: Science and Practice, Psychologist Robert Cialdini used this term to describe how other’s behavior strongly influences our own, even when we’re not aware of it. He was describing it in the context of sales people taking advantage of prospective customers by convincing them to buy something by telling them that the product is extremely popular. While social proof can sometimes lead us stray in circumstances like the ones he describes, it is generally a very reliable heuristic and is particularly powerful in times of uncertainty. If you’re hesitant of what do in a situation, maybe your first formal dinner party, looking to others is a probably a good idea. The reason for this is that people are generally right, or at least that following the crowd is often a good idea. This is not to say that independence and originality aren’t extremely important, but following the crowd is, in general, a good idea. If everyone else is driving on the right side of the road, you’re probably better off doing what everyone else is doing. The problem is that this generally reliable heuristic can lead us astray when not following the crowd is indeed a good idea. This is how Gilbert’s TED talk, when viewed through the lens of heuristics and biases, ties into the bystander effect.

Why should the number of people around you impact how likely someone is to help a person in distress? After all, wouldn’t the fact that more people are nearby increase the chances of someone giving aid? The researchers I mentioned above, Latané and Darley, tested to see what impact the number of people had when someone feigned a seizure. The results were as lucid as they were counterintuitive. When it was just one subject and the seizure victim, 85% of subjects responded with an average time of 52 seconds. With one subject and one confederate (a person who seems to the subject to be another subject but is in fact working with the psychologists) who was instructed not to act, the subject responded an average of 62% of the time and took an average of 93 seconds to do so. Here’s the major shocker: with one subject and four confederates, the subject responded only 31% of the time and took an average of 166 seconds to do so. It’s important to note that the people in this experiment were just like you and me, ordinary college students. Similar findings have been found time and time again under a variety of circumstances and conditions. But why should it be that the amount of help a person is likely to get is so strongly inversely correlated with the number of potential helpers? How can we explain why no one intervened in the cases of Kitty Genovese and old Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax and countless others?

There are three main reasons for the existence of the bystander effect. The first reason is diffusion of responsibly. Maybe you look at a problem, like someone clearly cutting through a bike lock and proceeding to steal it in front of a crowd of several dozen on campus. Many might think to themselves, “Well, there are tons of other people here; someone else will probably do something.” The second is that in some situations it may be difficult to assess whether or not it’s an actual emergency, which leads to the bigger problem of pluralistic ignorance. It goes like this; you see someone collapse and have what looks like a seizure. You’re unsure of what to do. You keep your face calm, so as not to lose status by looking like an idiot in front of the people around you by overreacting, turn to the heuristic of social proof and look at the people around you to see if their acting like it’s an emergency. Meanwhile, the people around you are unsure of what to do, so they stay calm and look at you. No one is acting like it’s an emergency and the heuristic of social proof allows us to comfortably conclude that it’s probably not an emergency. This is summarized in different words by Latané and Darley in their paper describing their experiment, “Bystander inaction in real-life emergencies is often explained by “apathy,” “alienation,” and “anomie.” This experiment suggests that the explanation may lie more in the bystander’s response to other observers than in his [or her] indifference to the victim.”

In general, personality and background measures were not predictive of whether or not a person was likely to help. The implication of this is that you are no more likely to respond to a possible emergency in a crowd than anyone else. Until today! It turns out that the bystander effect is one of the easiest heuristic failures to overcome. All it takes is knowledge of the bystander effect and the ability to apply that knowledge in real life. You can be confident that if you see someone on campus or near your homes, either possibly committing a crime or undergoing a possible emergency, that no one will help because everyone assumes someone else will help, or no one wants to look stupid. That’s where your knowledge comes in – you now know not to make that assumption. You know that you need to act or it’s likely that no one else will. But, you might ask, what if it’s not really an emergency? Say you’re walking through old town and you see someone in front of you stagger, then collapse on a bench. Did they just pass out drunk, or have a heart attack? What should you do? The best thing I can suggest is to err on the side of caution and assume that it is. It might be terrifying to risk looking stupid in front of a group by possibly overreacting, but it’s worth it if it means that you might save someone’s life. Even if you’re wrong and he’s just sleeping one off, you can rest easy knowing that, if it had been an emergency, he would have received aid. If everyone around you glances at the man as he slumps over on the bench and then calmly walks on, you now know what’s going on in their minds and, most importantly, you won’t fall prey to pluralistic ignorance.

There’s only one more thing to cover. What happens if someday you are unfortunately put in a situation where you need help and you’re surrounded by a crowd of strangers? Fortunately, the solution to this is quite simple. In the event of an emergency, it’s easy to force the crowd to overcome the bystander effect. You dispel any possibility of pluralistic ignorance by unambiguously stating that it’s an emergency. If you think you’re having a heart attack, say so! This shatters the barrier of pluralistic ignorance in one move. Move two is to eliminate the diffusion of responsibility of the crowd. After all, just because they know it’s an emergency, they might expect someone else to act. Think back to how in Latané and Darley experiment 85% of subject helped (and I think it would have been much higher if the situation had been a clear emergency) when they were alone? Accomplish this in a crowd by pointing to a single person in the crowd and say, “You there, in the blue jacket! I think I’m having a heart attack. Call 911!” This way, you can eliminate the crowd’s diffusion of responsibility by shouldering the responsibility on one person.

Knowledge of the bystander effect and how to overcome it, both when you’re the bystander and the victim, are enough to prevent tragedies like those that befell Kitty and Hugo. If one of the passersby had known about the psychology of a group’s reaction to an emergency, someone would have helped. If Kitty or Hugo had known about it, they could have singled someone out and radically increased their chances to receive aid. Gilbert showed how people are less than perfectly rational decision makers. Kahneman and Tversky showed how much of this can be explained by various biases and heuristics that we all are susceptible to. I showed how the heuristic of social proof helps explain the bystander effect, as well as how to overcome it. Remember the lesson of how to overcome the bystander effect yourself, as well as the more general lesson: we aren’t instinctively optimal decision makers. If learning about the heuristic of social proof allows us to overcome the bystander effect, learning more about the field of heuristics and biases may help us in any number of ways.

The Monty Hall Problem As An Introduction to Bayesian Reasoning

Behind door one is a goat, do you switch?

The Monty Hall Problem comes from the TV show Let’s Make A Deal. There are a bunch of other really good explanations of the problem online, so I’ll be brief because my only reason for discussing it is because it serves as a great example as an introduction to Bayesian reasoning. First, let’s quickly explore the problem.

On the game show, you’re shown three doors. One door has a new car behind it (yours to keep if you pick that door) and the other two contain goats (I’m not sure if you get to keep the goat). You choose door number 3 and the host opens door number 1 to reveal a goat. Then, you’re given a chance to switch to door 2. Should you switch?

The answer is yes. This is Not a matter of opinion. Let me explain why, since the intuitive answer is that the doors have equal odds so just go with your gut. Bayesian probability is the mathematical formula governing decision theory. There’s no need to write out any formulas here, but I recommend An Intuitive Guide to Bayes’ Theorem if you’re interested in learning more. The essence Bayesian reasoning is this: update your beliefs when you get new evidence. 

With regards to the Monty Hall Problem, we will have to use some simple fractions. Before you make you initial choice, each door has exactly a 1/3 chance of being the winning door. Say you choose door number 3, with probability 1/3 of having the car behind it. Monty opens door number 1, revealing a goat. Now, you’re given the option to change your choice. Why should you always switch? Don’t the doors have equal odds? Think about Bayes’ rule. The doors did have equal odds, but then you got new evidence. You learned that door number 1 had a goat behind it, not the car. Since the total probability of anything must always equal 1, the probability must be distributed to the rest of the situation.

Most people intuit that the odds are then shifted to the two remaining doors, along the unconscious line of thought that runs, “Ok, so it’s not door 1, so now the odds must be 1/2 for each remaining door.” Why is this wrong? Because the odds for your door don’t shift when door 1 is revealed to contain a goat because the probability for door 3 was set when you chose that door. Door 3 had a 1/3 chance and doors 1 and 2 had a combined 2/3 chance. When door 1 was shown to contain a goat, the 1/3 and 1/3 probability combines on door 2.

If that doesn’t seem to ring on an intuitive level, you’re not alone. It took a while for me to think with numbers long enough to see why you should always switch on a gut level. Try imagining the same problem, but there are a thousand doors and Monty opens all but one and the one you chose.

The key lesson to take from this is that when you encounter new evidence, you should update your beliefs. Bayes’ rule goes way beyond problems like the Monty Hall Problem. Say your car won’t start and you assign equal odds to 4 different possible issues. If it’s not the starter, the odds go up that it’s the ignition switch. I wrote this post rather quickly, so please let me know of any confusing sloppiness. I’ll write more on Bayesian reasoning if it garners any interest. It might not be my strongest area of expertise or explainability, but it’s fascinating and learning to think like this is very useful if you’re interested in making correct decisions.

LEEROY JENKINS!

 

So I just discovered this video while reading on TV Tropes, a great site devoted to cataloging the various literary devices used in the media. The only real way to get a feel for the site is to click the link above and type in the name of your favorite show or book or game or what have you.

Anyway, this is just a quick fun post to share the video that just had me literally rolling around and laughing with tears in my eyes. Before seeing the video, of which you really only need to watch the first 90 seconds, here’s a snippet of the trope page so you can better understand where this came from. I play almost exclusively RPGs and Online first person shooters, so I totally related to this. The incident in the following video (I don’t play WoW, but I can relate to having plants thwarted in this manner) is now famous and the guy who’s Avatar is Leeroy Jenkins now has some minor nerd celebrity.

“You’re playing your favorite MMORPG, First-Person Shooter or other online combat game. You and your team have come up with a workable strategy for how to tackle a challenging opponent. It will require organization and good timing, but you’re sure it will work if you get everything set up in advance… wait, did KillerMonkeyz548 just open fire? Congratulations, your brilliant plan has just been ruined in one move by a Leeroy Jenkins.

The Leeroy Jenkins (or just Leeroy for short) is a specific type of Noob who has no patience for complicated plans, preferring to charge full-tilt into the fray and start attacking whatever’s in front of him. Since this is a semi-viable strategy some of the time (depending on what game you’re playing and the difficulty of the opposition), a Leeroy can remain undetected until the team hits the first real challenge, whereupon he gets everyone killed. Any attempts to point out that he had totally ignored the plan will be met with “plans are stupid” or similar. And he will never retreat.”

Revival

A thousand fake extra credit points to anyone who can tell me where this is from and how it ties in to the title of this post!

Well well well. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this screen. Where on Earth have I been?

Let me try to remember when I left off… I think it was the end of last summer. Wow, it doesn’t feel that long. I’ve often thought about getting back to this, and now it’s time. In my last post I gave the stats for the site I was given around New Years. This site had 3 posts that year and received 16,000 visits. That’s not huge as far as the internet is concerned, but for a hum-drum, inactive blog, that blew my mind.

My most popular posts were the ones from my series on logical fallacies. That’s great for a lot of reasons! One, they were some of the easiest and most fun for me to write because I enjoy that topic and know a lot about it. Two, its great knowledge for everyone to arm themselves with. And three, I have plenty more in mind to write. I could go on, but I have more things I want to cover.

It’s been a big year (and a half) for me and the world of science.

• We put the Curiosity Rover on Mars, with awesome new equipment and goals.
• After tens of billions of dollars and many years, we’ve found the Higgs’ Boson and, in the words of Physicist Sean Carrol, “The easy part of physics is now over.”
• Scientists at Cornell use a specialised lens to entirely cloak an object from view for 40 trillionths of a second by altering the speed of light – effectively making an invisibility cloak.
• We’ve discovered A LOT more exoplanets, (planets not orbiting our sun) which increases our chances of finding a suitable place to eventually migrate to.
• 3D Printing has taken off, opening doors to places that include printing computer chips and stem cells.
• We have self-driving cars being approved for use in some of the United States.
• We had patients implanted with organs that were grown from their own tissues so that there is no need for immunosuppressant drugs.
• We resolved that bit of confusion where neutrinos were thought to have travelled faster than the speed of light. Turns out it was computer error.
• We had breakthroughs in quantum computing, which is a step along the way to breathtaking technologies.
• Dutch and German scientists unveil a new brain-scanning FMRI device that allows paralyzed people to type out words using only their thoughts. This is a step in a direction that I plan to pursue myself, or at least follow.

I was going to keep going, but that got long really quickly. For a more complete list, it turns out that Wikipedia has us covered, as usual.

For me personally, the list will be kept shorter.

• I met the woman of my dreams. She’s really smart and stunningly beautiful (bonus!) and is currently getting her Master’s at Columbia University. The advanced standing program she’s in will take a total of 10 months.
• As a result, I got to visit New York City a couple of times! It’s a lot more fun than it looks like on Seinfeld. Or, at least, they don’t seem to realize how much fun they could be having.
• I had a few jobs throughout the year, which is unusual for me because I used to average about a job per year.
• Following a minor but evasive epiphany, I am studying Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology (as well as the other tedious stuff they make people learn, which I’m sure I’ll get into in a later post) at CSU and only have two semesters left before I earn my undergrad in psychology.
• I moved a couple of times, and just put a deposit down this morning for a new, more permanent place, to move into in April.
• Became familiar with a few new (to me and relatively new to the subject) areas of psychology, like heuristics and biases.
• Oh, and that thing about writing for Atheism and Me never worked out. I wrote like one thing and lost fuel again, so I don’t write for them anymore, so all of my stuff will now be on here.

I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out, but I think that will suffice for now. I have been busy, but not too busy for this blog. I just sort of ran out of steam right around when I got busy/distracted, but the urge to write never really left me. I don’t plan to get back into a post a day, but hopefully one or two a week. I have a very full school schedule I work part-time. However, I’ve planned out a lot of things I want to write posts on, so I shouldn’t have too much trouble finding things to talk about. Maybe I’ll do one serious post per week and one on something less serious, since there are a few of those I want to write about as well. Things I plan to cover soon, (no more bulleted lists) are some more fallacies and heuristics and biases, more stuff about/comparing/contrasting skepticism with science and rationality, and a sequence of posts leading up to and explaining why I am choosing to get into the field that I’m studying.

I’m glad to be back! I can’t be positive that my writer’s fuel (should I just use the word Muse?) wont die out again, but it’s been building for a while so I don’t see that happening. I might get busy, but not so busy that I wont find time for this.

2012 in review

In the back of my mind, I know this blog is still here. I’ve been very busy and made a lot of progress in different life areas this year. I’d like to start posting again sometime soon. Maybe when next semester starts. (I’m back in school now. Studying cognitive psychology as a gateway to neuroscience programs) Anyway, here’s this year’s review.

 

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 16,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 4 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

I Am An Atheist

The following is a cut and paste from this article on atheismandme.com. Those of you who have followed this blog for a while will likely recognize some of the content from earlier posts on thinkthatthrough. The reason isn’t simple laziness, but rather just wanting to share some things that I’ve already produced with a wider audience. However, there are some big changes between the posts already on here and this one. If you have the urge to comment, you are very much encouraged to! If you want, please feel free to comment on both websites, preferably the one following the link above if you can only choose one. This was more people will see it.

Now to the post itself:

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My name is Steven Zuber and I’m elated to have been brought on as a guest writer here at Atheism and Me. I’ll save more about me for the end.

Most atheists that I’ve met were religious at some point in their lives. They either stopped because it didn’t make sense or an incident caused them to be skeptical and God couldn’t withstand skeptical scrutiny. I’m not sure if I count myself among those that were once religious, but my back story in this part of my life seemed like an appropriate place to start.

I was raised in a religiously moderate household. I don’t know if I ever believed in God in any meaningful way. I accepted His (I usually use sex-neutral language, but the dominant religions is pretty adamant that God has a penis) existence in the same way I accepted the existence of Santa Clause and Mount Fuji. My level of belief in God fell somewhere between the two in my spectrum of confidence to my young, not-quite-bayesian mind. I believed in Him more than Santa, less than Mount Fuji. As an eleven year old, all of these things were unprovable to me and I accepted them more or less on faith. I tested the Santa hypothesis when I was 7, yet the scientific method isn’t quite intuitive to human children.

For the record, I still haven’t been to Mount Fuji. I accept it’s existence on a sort of trust in my senses from what I’ve seen on TV and maps and the testimony of people who have seen it. It could be part of some huge conspiracy to trick me, but it would be impossible to operate in life if I took concerns like that seriously. To a mind that tries to roughly calculate probabilities of it’s beliefs, the possibility of Mount Fuji not existing are tantamount to zero.

In any case, God’s existence was accepted by my child mind in the same way that it accepts basically every piece of information it takes in before I developed reasoning faculties. Humans are programmed this way. We are told that vegetables are good for you and falling from a sufficient height will kill you, and we accept that as children. Skeptical children did not survive long enough to pass on their skeptic genes. If toddlers were programmed to experiment and check to see if that lake was really full of crocodiles or if fire really does burn you, they’d get killed off. This is part of the reason that it took so long for our species to start doing science properly – we aren’t pre-programmed to be good scientists.

Skipping ahead. When I was about 11 or 12, (right around when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened here in the States) I was in some sort of geography or history class and it we were being taught about when the Europeans were first visiting North America (remember, this was the 11-year-old version, so it was the nice version that didn’t include the trading of STDs and slaves) and were “bringing Christianity” to the natives. This confused me, because I was vaguely taught that you had to be a Christian to go to Heaven. I asked my parents if the American Indians went to hell before they learned about Christianity. I don’t remember the answers I got vividly, but I know that I knew that they were less than satisfactory. When I pressed the point, I was told that “that’s where faith comes in.” Maybe by that time I’d already realized how counter intuitive it was that Hitler, as a proper-ish Christian/Catholic, got to go to Heaven while all of the Indians went to hell.

I can’t exactly remember the order in which these thoughts occurred, but the answer was always the same; “That’s where Faith comes in”. Even as a child, this didn’t make sense to me. So what, faith is just believing something that you admit doesn’t make sense? Why does that work on some questions but not others? I was pretty sure that if I put “Faith” as an answer on a test in school, it’d get marked wrong. Why did society hold itself to a lower standard than 6^thgrade classrooms?

I have heard from religious and non-religious people alike that, especially on this issue, the belief (or non belief) comes first and then people just reason backwards/rationalize. I find that this is true in one direction and not the other as this was not the case for me, nor that of any atheist I’ve met. Most (perhaps all, as I’ve never met or heard of anyone who honestly began without religion and, after an honest and rigorous investigation of the evidence, concluded that a certain religion is true) religious people are religious first and rational second. At this stage in my life, I wanted to believe in God because I was convinced that it was the only way for me to not succumb to nihilism. I wasn’t looking for existence of Christianity’s God. Evil really does falsify that idea. I should add that I was never “close to Jesus” or anything at any stage in my life. I understood the idea of the sin redemption thing, but it never made sense to me. If God wanted to forgive us (for acting the way he knew we would because he’s omniscient?) why not just do it instead of incarnating himself in human form and then arranging for his own execution and then proceeding to blame the Jews for doing it even though he intended for it to happen? Richard Dawkins has made this point as well in his book The God Delusion and his TV documentary The Root of All Evil.

I was looking for any sort of “higher meaning” because, at the time, I believed that it was the only thing that could provide meaning in the universe. I was briefly swayed by the argument that God is the basis of all morality, but as soon as I heard of the Euthyphro Dilemma that didn’t work anymore. The Fine-Tuning Argument worked for a bit, but then I realized that the Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit (I didn’t know it by that name at the time, but I understood the point) refuted that one as well.

I teetered for a while on the edge of nihilism. I couldn’t force myself to try and believe something that I didn’t think was true in order to make myself feel better. But this story has a happy ending. I am not exactly sure if it was a specific moment or a gradual realization, but I came to understand that the universe is meaningful because WE, and any other sentient beings out there, make it meaningful. Consciousness and intelligence are what make the universe interesting and important. A universe that contained only rocks wouldn’t be any better than no universe at all. The universe matters because it contains life and we make it matter.

Bottom line: I really did give religion a heartfelt try for years, but I couldn’t bullshit myself into it. In retrospect, God was really just the first of many irrational ideas that were planted into my young mind that I eventually weeded out. I’m probably still weeding waste out, but God went first because it is the most glaring and obviously absurd thought that it stood out, even to my childish mind. Ghosts and the afterlife soon followed. And now I don’t believe in alien visitation or magic crystals or bigfoot either. Letting go of religion was my first step on the path down scientific discovery and skepticism that I am on now and if I could somehow go back in time and change the path I took, the present me would not benefit from it. It has been months since I’ve been unhappy for more than a few minute stretch and I am occasionally moved to tears by the overwhelming meaning my perspective of the universe gives me (some would try to label this a “religious experience” but I prefer the term spiritual, even though that has a lot of baggage too). I have meaning and love and happiness and (at least some) knowledge. What more could I want?

And for the record, I think I’m right too. If compelling evidence ever does come up, I’ll reevaluate my position. But I’m not holding my breath.

And You’re and Atheist Too

That’s right, even any of you who say you’re religious. Let me explain with a story.

I was having lunch with my grandmother a few months ago. She knew I was looking for a new job and asked what I said to the interviewer when I was asked about my religion. (Needless to say, she hasn’t been interviewed for a job in a long time.) She’s what I would call an abstract religious person. That is to say, she believes in a god of some sort, probably close to the Judeo-Christian one, but not any organized religion. She has since then expanded on this thought and explained to me that she sees god in her garden and its a quiet and personal part of her.

Anyway – for reasons that escape to me since I’ve never been in-your-face with anyone in my family with about views on religion – she inexplicably says to me that she simply can’t understand atheism; agnosticism sure, but not atheism.

I thought for a moment before answering. The first thing I said was, “Grandma, I don’t think you want to have this conversation with me.” I knew that she was as benign of a believer as is possible and I didn’t want to devastate the Nicest Old Lady in the World’s comforting beliefs.

But I couldn’t leave it there, because I at least wanted to explain that she could indeed understand atheism, since she was an atheist too. I explained to her, very politely, the usual rebuttal to this line of thought. “Everyone is an atheist about most gods, some of us just go one god further.” This is another argument from Richard Dawkins and it’s a shorter way of phrasing an argument made by Stephen F. Roberts who said, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

As it turns out, my grandma didn’t know about Thor or Ba’al or Zeus (she was educated in a small town in Nebraska several decades ago. I doubt they covered these dead gods, but even this they did, it’s easy enough to see why she forgot about them.) So if someone hits you with the claim that atheism requires faith or they can’t understand it, try pointing out some of the dead gods that everyone is an atheist about. If that doesn’t work, point out the many parallels that today’s popular god has with Santa Claus; rewards good behavior, omniscient, punishes bad people, super powers, et cetera. The only thing that separates God from Santa is that almost everyone outgrows Santa before puberty. If the religious don’t stay up at night wondering if they should change religions or try to appease Santa, then they implicitly understand what it feels like to be an atheist.

* * *

Thanks for making it this far! I love feedback so if you like what you read, please leave a comment. If you hated what you read, please leave a (polite and constructive) comment. If you want to check out some of my older work, check out thinkthathrough.wordpress.com. I’m looking forward to continuing being a part of Atheism and Me.

Also, find me on twitter! Search my name or TheStevenator01.

I’ve Moved!

I was recently brought on as a guest blogger at a different site. Check me out at my new writing platform atheism and me. I’m going to continue to post everything I post on that website on here, but I encourage you to check out the link as well.

The reason I am moving is mainly because his site has tens of thousands of viewers rather than just a couple hundred like this one. Also, I’ve been experiencing a bit of writer’s block the past few months and having some more encouragement to write, as well as rough deadlines, works as a cure.

I’ll reblog everything I write over there on this website so you can still get updates on it without having to subscribe to atheism and me, though I encourage you to. I should mention that, though the name might suggest it, it isn’t simply a religion bashing site.

Thanks for staying tuned to this site even though I’ve been rather apathetic lately. I plan to be more active in the coming months.

Sam Harris – Lying

I mentioned in a previous post that Sam Harris had a new e-book coming out. Unfortunately, it premiered on Kindle and I didn’t get around to reading it until a few days weeks ago when it came out in PDF format. It only took about an hour to read, but it was still more than worth the three bucks I spent on it. Check out the quick blurb on Harris’ website.

In Lying, bestselling author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie. He focuses on “white” lies—those lies we tell for the purpose of sparing people discomfort—for these are the lies that most often tempt us. And they tend to be the only lies that good people tell while imagining that they are being good in the process.

I don’t want to get too much into the details of the book because I want people to read it themselves. What I will do is discuss a few of specific things that are brought up in it. For one, I was pleased that, for the most part, I was already doing most of what Harris argues everyone should do. I avoid lying, even white lies, for a simple reason: I don’t want to be lied to. For me, knowing is always better than not knowing and I believe that, deep down, everyone else would prefer the same.

Pinning down exactly what a lie is can be a little difficult. However, we need no needlessly convolute ourselves by quibbling over a definition. To lie is simply to intentionally mislead others when they are expecting you to be honest. This leaves people who lie in a strait forward kind of way, like stage magicians (or at least the good ones), or someone who is just kidding about something, and people who are simply mistaken. It isn’t a lie unless you mislead someone about reality on purpose.

Harris is not a deontologist. That is, with regards to ethics, he doesn’t not believe in absolute rules that must be followed no matter what. For more on deontology, wiki-search it along with it’s biggest name, Immanuel Kant. He addresses the point of what one ought to do when, in the form of the old and useful hypthetical: what do you do when an ax murderer (or in my preference, Nazis) come knocking and you’ve got the person their looking for hiding in your attic. No joke, in almost every interpretation, Kant would say to tell them the truth and have you, the people you’re hiding, and you’re family, die. Harris’ argument here is two-fold and both points are contained in the following excerpt:

In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a real relationship with this person to be nonexistent. For most of us, such circumstances arise very rarely in life, if ever. And even when they seem to, it is often possible to worry that lying was the easy (and less than truly ethical) way out.

The main thing to take away is that, when the temptation arises to consider whether or not the situation you are in is one of those few where lying is the only option you have, it’s probably not. And if it is, it is done so at the cost of ever treating the other person as an equal to yourself.

It says something unfortunate about human psychology that most people need a rigorous argument to persuade them not to lie to those close to them. “Of course”, one protests, “we don’t usually tell harmful lies to our loved ones. We only shade the truth to spare their feelings or to encourage them.” While the temptation to lie for the sake of our loved one’s feelings can seem overwhelming, are we really treating people with respect when we assume we know what is better for them than they do? Another excerpt says this better than I can:

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world. This is an extraordinary stance to adopt toward other human beings, and it requires justification. Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he can know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance. What attitude could be more disrespectful of those we care about?

I for one never ask a question unless I want an honest answer. As it turns out, there is a rationality enhancing technique called Crocker’s Rule which applies very well to this type of situation. From the LessWrong wiki (linked above)

“By declaring commitment to Crocker’s rules, one authorizes other debaters to optimize their messages for information, even when this entails that emotional feelings will be disregarded. The underlying assumption is that rudeness is sometimes necessary for effective conveyance of information, if only to signal a lack of patience or tolerance: after all, knowing whether the speaker is becoming angry or despondent is useful rational evidence.”

This is complimentary to, but not quite the same as, Harris’ thesis. Someone who has adopted a commitment to Crocker’s rule hasn’t done the same thing as endorsing Harris’ proposal of radical honesty. Rather, they are saying they wont be offended if someone is radically honest with them because their aim in a discussion isn’t to have their feelings coddled but rather to effectively debate. I argue in favor of both. I think it is nigh impossible to endorse a policy of open honesty with everyone and yet still wish they would lie to you.

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There are a few more things to cover in my discussion of this book. Specifically, I want to focus on a couple of things I think Harris wasn’t overly thorough on and then explore my own thoughts on them. Harris does briefly cover the topic of secret-keeping, but he doesn’t really explain his thoughts on what he thinks one should do when being forced to keep a secret. In his example, he discusses a couple that he knew in which the male was cheating on his spouse and several of their friends knew. He describes how sickening this situation was and how it ruined several friendships, but he doesn’t explore what is, to me, one of the most pressing questions in this situation: should you, as the friend who knows, tell the spouse who is being cheated on?

This opens several cans of worms. On the one hand, if you’re friends with the cheater and not that close with the spouse, it will almost certainly ruin your friendship. However, you need to ask yourself, do you really want friends like that? Either A, you’re friend is a philandering jerk who is perfectly ok disregarding the feelings of his spouse or B, he’s a person who isn’t dedicated to bettering himself and thus wont thank you for ruining his net of lies. I distantly know one or two couples who have an unfaithful partner. Since I’m not close enough to any of them to even have any of their phone numbers, or even Facebook friends, I don’t feel like I need to step in. But what would I do if I was in a situation where one of my very close friends told me he or she was cheating on their loved one and had ever intention of leaving them in the dark? I have given this a lot of thought and, baring a few parameters, I would first do my utmost to persuade my friend to come clean to their partner about the infidelity. If that failed, I would try to force their hand by threatening to tell the partner myself. If that failed, I would follow through with my threat.

Am I a bad person for deciding that I would rather have people recognize and deal with reality rather than persist in delusion? On the one hand, I have failed to keep the (either explicitly requested or strongly implied) secret of my friend. But my policy on secret keeping is apparently rather unusual. Unless it is for something cheerful, like surprise birthday party, or personal, like someone telling me a private story about themselves, I don’t let people believe that I will keep harmful secrets. By that, I mean that I will never reveal anything in the spirit of gossip, but I won’t help you conceal something blatantly unethical without some very good reasons. This makes things a tad complicated for me when someone tells me something compromising and uncomfortable and then says, “Oh! But you can’t tell anyone, especially the person that this most concerns!”

Imagine this situation (it’s completely hypothetical): Assume you’ve been practicing semi-radical honesty for quite a while. You’re in your late teens and your father says to you, “I’m divorcing your mother next month. Oh, but don’t tell her.” What do you do? You see your mom every day and you know that she will be blindsided by this. Worse, you’ve been contracted to keep a bad secret on an est post facto basis without your consent. In this situation, the answer is probably obvious. I play similar situations case-by-case, but it almost never comes up in my life anymore. Most people in my life know that I am not the guy to go to when they feel the urge to brag about their misdoings. It’s not that I’m a snitch who will automatically run off to turn them in, but I’m just not impressed with that sort of behavior.

The idea of an entire community that doesn’t lie currently only exists in fiction. Two of my favorite examples are from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series. In the Wheel of Time, about 1-2% of the population can use magic, and they are severely distrusted. In order to try and remedy this, and also for personal discipline (that way it isn’t as cheap as just trying to foster good PR) they swear an oath with a magic instrument that will bind them to it. However, this doesn’t do too much to help with their public image of trustworthiness because, like Asimov’s 3 Laws for Robots, it leaves enough wiggle room to get away with what you want. To “speak no word that isn’t true” isn’t the same thing as always being openly honest. Harris covers this kind of deception with a short hypothetical that involves someone standing on a public access area of the White House and placing a call saying, “Hello, I am calling from the White House and . . .” Harris is right to characterize this as a type of lying as well, since, while technically true, it is carefully calculated to deceive. There is no reason to split hairs here; if you’re deliberately trying to conceal the truth, whether by outright lying or careful misdirection, it’s lying.

This book really is worth your time. It’s only 54 pages long and you can read it in one sitting. Everyone already knows lying is wrong, but people do it anyway. Maybe all people need is a light kick to the mind in order to make a commitment to better themselves. Honesty begets happiness through many avenues, particularly through the forming of strong, healthy relationships and human interactions. Seriously, buy this book and read it. It costs less than a cup of coffee and can change your life.

***

Sorry I’ve been so long (months?!) between posts. It has been another period of personal growth and reflection for me. Not only have I been trying to pin down my life plans, but I’ve had some other things going on too. My job that I got a couple of months ago pretty much pins me down for my most productive hours, and I’ve been looking for some fresh and better work. I am still trying to figure out what I can do with my life that will make things better for everyone. I don’t think I can single-handedly change the world, but I can’t live with myself if I don’t do something. Most people I know, and anyone who honestly examines the world, can’t help but conclude that a lot of things are really screwed up. Oddly, this is where most people stop their train of thought. I have one friend who doesn’t want to sign up for cryonics because he’s convinced that the future will suck even worse. Why doesn’t it occur to him to do something about it? Granted, most of the problems that are worth solving aren’t going to be easy to fix. But the things that are worth doing aren’t always easy.

Anyway, I hope it wont be so long until my next post. Thanks for hanging tight during my hiatuses!

I’m Not Dead

I’m not dead!

My decision to change the format of this blog turned into a convenient excuse to be lazy with regards to this blog. But then that turned into a good excuse to take another introspective period of time so I can try to grow as a person/get my life together. It wasn’t as vigorous as it was this summer, but I’ve made some progress. I also had some real-world things to do: figure out if I need to look for new place, decide to find one at the last-minute, figure our the technicalities, and so on to a bunch of other boring stuff you don’t want to hear about. Also, I found and am temporarily housing a kitty!

I have been working on a few blog posts on the back burner during this time though! I intend to finish/start-and-finish a few of them soon. Quick preview of the ideas I’m working on; a review and discussion of Sam Harris’ new book Lying, my reasons for my resolution to be cryogenically frozen, a discussion of Pascal’s Wager, and more! Of course, I’ll need to write something in commemoration of the life and personal impact of the late Christopher Hitchens as well.

Anyway, thanks for hanging with me for this long! But then again, not reading posts probably doesn’t require too much effort. This post was just intended as a notice that I haven’t completely abounded this thing and to let you know that I’ll be making a come-back sometime in the near(ish) future. Cheers, all!

Announcement – Format Change

I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks and I have decided to shift the purpose of my blog slightly. Rather, the purpose it served for me. I started this blog to make myself productive and force myself to think and produce something every day. It has served that purpose and I haven’t felt stagnant for a couple of months.

The only changes that you, the readers, are going to notice are 1) Better quality! I have been dragging myself to produce B or C quality posts just so I can meet a self-imposed deadline. Instead of that, I am going to take my time and make sure that I never have to put a note at the end that says “I had more to cover, but I don’t have time.” This will lead to the second change; Less frequent posts. Instead of doing 6.5 posts per week, I will be doing maybe 10 a month, max. I want to write long and detailed and fully thought out posts instead of throwing stuff together in a few minutes. Right now I am partially through about a dozen that I couldn’t bring myself to publish in their current, unfinished state. I want to do the topics I cover justice and make sure I cover everything I can in them.

This should make my subscriber’s inboxes a little lighter. If there is anyone out there who is disappointed by the fact that I will no longer be publishing daily, I promise to make up for it by radically improving the quality of my posts. I think that’s all for today! As always, I give a very sincere thank you to all of my readers and subscribers. Cheers, All!