I heard a very fascinating NPR debate tonight on the merits of religion. The topic was simply this: would the world be better off without religion? The two sides both had good points, but the most interesting thing for me was this fascinating duality. The pro-religion side counted, correctly, as one of their main points the fact that religious people are statistically the most charitable and giving people on the planet. That wherever you go, where there are poor and downtrodden folk struggling to make their way you'll find believers helping. And, as Nicholas Kristoff of the NY Times noted: "The difference between the religious believers and everyone else is that the believers stay."
And yet, the opposing side noted, also correctly, that for the most part, wherever you find strife and war and intolerance, you'll also find more often than not that religion is the root of whatever evil is occurring. So where does that leave us?
I had the thought as I was listening to this, that the real answer isn't something intrinsic to religious belief itself, but rather a kind of byproduct of belonging to a religion. You see, there's a growing mass of evidence in fields like sociology, neuroscience, history, etc that humans evolved in small but closely knit kin groupings, tribes if you will, and that we're hard-wired for existence in that kind of society. Namely, we're designed to have a smallish group of people that we trust implicitly and depend on for our existence, and everyone outside of that group is a potential danger. This is a gross simplification of course, but it's roughly the idea.
So what's that got to do with religion? Well my theory is that religion taps into that deep, tribal belonging portion of our brains. Something similar happens with powerful ideologies, like those of various political movements, and also in sports, where people develop incredibly strong feelings for "their" teams and fellow fans who have nothing in common except that they're wearing the same colored shirts.
Religion's power as a force for social good is that it short-circuit's people's usual aversion to growing their sense of tribal self; by seeing others as potential converts and fellow-believers, it brings the others into the tribe, so to speak. Much of morality stems from seeing other people as beings like yourself, and this slow recognition of similarity is what helped the growth of tribes into ethnic groups and thence into nations, and is probably one of the main forces for spreading peace in the world.
Religious groups simply do a *really* good job at bringing people into the tribe (note: a lot of these ideas are lifted almost directly from Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the dead). It sets up strongly delineated rules for who belongs and how to recognize belonging, what the perks are, what the punishments are for not belonging, and so on. And that's where all the good comes from: because when you really and truly believe that everyone of your faith are your brothers and sisters, that evolved obligation to help the members of your tribe gets turned on to help poor people in Africa. And this is a great thing! Religions were the first force to transcend race and gender and nationality, bringing people together who evolution would not have.
But the problem happens when this gets twisted, because one of the best ways to strengthen belonging in your own tribe is to direct hatred against those outside of the tribe: making everyone who doesn't belong an enemy. And unfortunately, religions have been very, very good at that, too. So the question I have is this: is there some way we can claim the good parts but not the bad? Build the sense of family and community without the blind faith in a divine being. Create that obligation to help people, without also creating the need to hate other people. I think that may be one of the great challenges for modern atheism.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Monday, June 6, 2011
Offside
Yesterday, I finally got around to watching Offside, an Iranian movie that came out in 2006. In Iran, women were (and I believe, still are) banned from attending major sporting events alongside men. Offside tells the story of a disparate group of girls, brought together in momentary captivity as each is caught attempting to sneak into the 2005 World Cup qualifier between Iran and Bahrain.
The movie occurs in nearly real-time, with many scenes shot at the actual game. The crowd scenes, and especially the scenes of celebration when Iran beats Bahrain 1-0 to qualify, lend a deeply authentic feel to the movie. Most of the movie revolves around the interplay between the girls and their guards, young soldiers who really aren't terribly committed to the idea that the girls must be kept out. Still, raised in a culture that holds that girls must be protected from the "cursing and swearing" of men watching sports, they obey their orders.
The thing I most enjoyed about Offside is its feeling of authenticity, the idea that this could really have been a snapshot of 90 minutes in 2005 Iran. There's much to the movie that seems deeply familiar, reminiscent of life in China. The buses in the opening scene, carrying the hordes of young men descending on the stadium, look exactly like the ones that used to carry me around Chongqing. So too do the motorcycle riders, heads bare and charging down a road going the wrong way, also bring to mind the streets of China.
But there's also a reflection at a deeper level, in momentary snapshots we get of the lives that the characters lead. Moments like a brief dialog hinting at the deep gulf between a provincial soldier's life and that of the city girls of Tehran. There is the confusion that shows in the young soldiers' faces, when they're asked to defend a policy they had no hand in creating, but believe is right because that's what they've always believed.
Most familiar of all, though, is the girls' desperate need to see the game. I've been in superficially similar situations, trying to sneak into sports stadiums to watch a Stanford or Texas football game. But the movie is really about much more than the mere need to see a sports game. The term "offside" in soccer means an attacking player is beyond the defenders, violating the rules. The girls in this movie are also offside, breaking the rules to get into the stadium, but what they're really reaching for and craving is to be a full and equal part of their society, to feel the belonging that comes from being part of the group.
Sports fandom is human nature at its most fundamental. It's tribalism, channeled in the service of competitive athletics. People who don't follow sports marvel at the ability of fans to dress up and paint their faces and stand in freezing rain for hours at a time, just to cheer for total strangers struggling in a competition that has no material impact on their lives. But really, sports fandom isn't just about the sport, it's about belonging to a community of fans, a tribe who's champions are doing battle on the field. It's about acceptance, where twenty strangers can walk into a bar and immediately become the closest of friends, brought together by the triumphal glories and soul-crushing defeats of a shared history.
Governments know the power of sports. The unification of Germany was aided by the triumph of the first joint-German team in the World Cup of 1990, and many a politician has seen his poll numbers bounce after a home-team victory. The girls in Offside, though they don't know it, are seeking the same thing. When they're seeking the right to cheer in victory and curse in defeat, what they're ultimately after is the right to be accepted, to become truly a part of their nation.
So it was for me, as well. As first the Chinese kid and then the nerd, there were many aspects of American life that were closed books to me, and none was as mysterious as the world of sports. Nothing symbolized my alienation from the "normal" aspects of growing up in America as much as my complete bewilderment by sports. In elementary school I tried, and usually failed, to play ball with the other kids, to be a part of their world, and in high school I ignored it, holding myself to be infinitely superior to the athletes and the mindless fans.
So it's fitting, now, through college and grad school, in the years in which I've become most comfortable with myself and my place in society, that sport has taken on such an important role in my life. I've found sports that I love myself, both to play and to watch. And in a small way, finding my place in society's athletic world has also helped me cement my place in society as a whole. Here's hoping that someday the women of Iran might be able to say the same.
The movie occurs in nearly real-time, with many scenes shot at the actual game. The crowd scenes, and especially the scenes of celebration when Iran beats Bahrain 1-0 to qualify, lend a deeply authentic feel to the movie. Most of the movie revolves around the interplay between the girls and their guards, young soldiers who really aren't terribly committed to the idea that the girls must be kept out. Still, raised in a culture that holds that girls must be protected from the "cursing and swearing" of men watching sports, they obey their orders.
The thing I most enjoyed about Offside is its feeling of authenticity, the idea that this could really have been a snapshot of 90 minutes in 2005 Iran. There's much to the movie that seems deeply familiar, reminiscent of life in China. The buses in the opening scene, carrying the hordes of young men descending on the stadium, look exactly like the ones that used to carry me around Chongqing. So too do the motorcycle riders, heads bare and charging down a road going the wrong way, also bring to mind the streets of China.
But there's also a reflection at a deeper level, in momentary snapshots we get of the lives that the characters lead. Moments like a brief dialog hinting at the deep gulf between a provincial soldier's life and that of the city girls of Tehran. There is the confusion that shows in the young soldiers' faces, when they're asked to defend a policy they had no hand in creating, but believe is right because that's what they've always believed.
Most familiar of all, though, is the girls' desperate need to see the game. I've been in superficially similar situations, trying to sneak into sports stadiums to watch a Stanford or Texas football game. But the movie is really about much more than the mere need to see a sports game. The term "offside" in soccer means an attacking player is beyond the defenders, violating the rules. The girls in this movie are also offside, breaking the rules to get into the stadium, but what they're really reaching for and craving is to be a full and equal part of their society, to feel the belonging that comes from being part of the group.
Sports fandom is human nature at its most fundamental. It's tribalism, channeled in the service of competitive athletics. People who don't follow sports marvel at the ability of fans to dress up and paint their faces and stand in freezing rain for hours at a time, just to cheer for total strangers struggling in a competition that has no material impact on their lives. But really, sports fandom isn't just about the sport, it's about belonging to a community of fans, a tribe who's champions are doing battle on the field. It's about acceptance, where twenty strangers can walk into a bar and immediately become the closest of friends, brought together by the triumphal glories and soul-crushing defeats of a shared history.
Governments know the power of sports. The unification of Germany was aided by the triumph of the first joint-German team in the World Cup of 1990, and many a politician has seen his poll numbers bounce after a home-team victory. The girls in Offside, though they don't know it, are seeking the same thing. When they're seeking the right to cheer in victory and curse in defeat, what they're ultimately after is the right to be accepted, to become truly a part of their nation.
So it was for me, as well. As first the Chinese kid and then the nerd, there were many aspects of American life that were closed books to me, and none was as mysterious as the world of sports. Nothing symbolized my alienation from the "normal" aspects of growing up in America as much as my complete bewilderment by sports. In elementary school I tried, and usually failed, to play ball with the other kids, to be a part of their world, and in high school I ignored it, holding myself to be infinitely superior to the athletes and the mindless fans.
So it's fitting, now, through college and grad school, in the years in which I've become most comfortable with myself and my place in society, that sport has taken on such an important role in my life. I've found sports that I love myself, both to play and to watch. And in a small way, finding my place in society's athletic world has also helped me cement my place in society as a whole. Here's hoping that someday the women of Iran might be able to say the same.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
The Proper Study of Man is Man (and Math)
A few months ago, at the launch of a new program for high school students and undergrads, the admin in charge of the program declared that we needed to get more kids interested in going to grad school in STEM (science, tech, eng, math) subjects and interested in pursuing tenure-track faculty jobs. And I thought that was just about the silliest thing ever, because if anything we have a massive oversupply of grad students fighting for faculty positions. Instead, the real solution is that we should be using STEM education as a foundation for students who go on to pursue careers in other areas.
Public policy is a field that comes to mind as crying out for attention from some rational, scientific thinkers. Decisions about our society are increasingly affected by problems that have technical roots, and of course technology in the form of massive amounts of data and statistical processing are giving policymakers better tools to help make their decisions. Global warming, health care, education: all these issues have problems and solutions that deeply intertwine both social and technological issues. But while most policy-makers are great people-persons, they often don't have any sort of technical background.
Proponents of liberal arts educations are certain that such an education creates great leaders, and certainly the ranks of our elite are strongly represented by folks with degrees in poly sci, international relations, history, etc. One of the reasons that people give for the strength of a liberal arts education is that students are taught to think deeply and analytically about a number of subjects. They're taught to ask questions and reason about the answers, to not accept what they're told but to use skepticism and a rational mind as tools.
That's the popular point, but I should point out that this also applies to a scientific education. Deep thought and constant questioning are (or should be) the hallmarks of the PhD process in engineering as well as in English Lit. The difference is the material. I think one of the strengths of a classical liberal arts education is that subject matter: whether it's art, literature, philosophy, history, or what have you, the ultimate subject of study for a liberal arts education is just one thing: humanity.
A liberal arts education, fundamentally, is the application of deep, penetrating thought to the study of how humans communicate, behave, and relate to each other. It's the study of how human institutions are created, how they function, how they succeed, and how they fail. And I think this is one of the reasons that such an education is immensely beneficial to the leaders of any sort of society.
To create good leaders, we need both pieces. Technological progress holds a lot of potential to address some really big social problems, and mathematical and statistical tools are giving us new ways of understanding and seeing how people behave. But to really be able to make good decisions around these things we need leaders who understand them, understand both the potential and limits of technology. Quantitative models revolutionized finance, but they also did a lot of damage, because people used them without understanding their limitations. The same pitfalls await in society at large.
There needs to be a dedicated effort to make technical educations a basis for people who won't go on to work in strictly technical fields. Just like studying economics doesn't imply you'll spend your life counting money, so a degree in engineering shouldn't imply that you'll spend your life building things. Instead, such an education should give you the tools to make rational decisions about scientific subjects throughout your life.
The other piece of the puzzle is that STEM folks who are on this path need better exposure to the humanities. And I don't mean in the old "oh chuck the nerds in the English classes for a bit of polish" type thing, but rationally and forcefully present to the students a clear vision for why such classes, and why that kind of thinking, matters.
Obama probably never took a math class past his freshman year, and almost certainly didn't have to take much physics. Likewise, many engineers I know, especially at big state schools, will never take a humanities class after freshman English. Either direction is a tragedy.
Public policy is a field that comes to mind as crying out for attention from some rational, scientific thinkers. Decisions about our society are increasingly affected by problems that have technical roots, and of course technology in the form of massive amounts of data and statistical processing are giving policymakers better tools to help make their decisions. Global warming, health care, education: all these issues have problems and solutions that deeply intertwine both social and technological issues. But while most policy-makers are great people-persons, they often don't have any sort of technical background.
Proponents of liberal arts educations are certain that such an education creates great leaders, and certainly the ranks of our elite are strongly represented by folks with degrees in poly sci, international relations, history, etc. One of the reasons that people give for the strength of a liberal arts education is that students are taught to think deeply and analytically about a number of subjects. They're taught to ask questions and reason about the answers, to not accept what they're told but to use skepticism and a rational mind as tools.
That's the popular point, but I should point out that this also applies to a scientific education. Deep thought and constant questioning are (or should be) the hallmarks of the PhD process in engineering as well as in English Lit. The difference is the material. I think one of the strengths of a classical liberal arts education is that subject matter: whether it's art, literature, philosophy, history, or what have you, the ultimate subject of study for a liberal arts education is just one thing: humanity.
A liberal arts education, fundamentally, is the application of deep, penetrating thought to the study of how humans communicate, behave, and relate to each other. It's the study of how human institutions are created, how they function, how they succeed, and how they fail. And I think this is one of the reasons that such an education is immensely beneficial to the leaders of any sort of society.
To create good leaders, we need both pieces. Technological progress holds a lot of potential to address some really big social problems, and mathematical and statistical tools are giving us new ways of understanding and seeing how people behave. But to really be able to make good decisions around these things we need leaders who understand them, understand both the potential and limits of technology. Quantitative models revolutionized finance, but they also did a lot of damage, because people used them without understanding their limitations. The same pitfalls await in society at large.
There needs to be a dedicated effort to make technical educations a basis for people who won't go on to work in strictly technical fields. Just like studying economics doesn't imply you'll spend your life counting money, so a degree in engineering shouldn't imply that you'll spend your life building things. Instead, such an education should give you the tools to make rational decisions about scientific subjects throughout your life.
The other piece of the puzzle is that STEM folks who are on this path need better exposure to the humanities. And I don't mean in the old "oh chuck the nerds in the English classes for a bit of polish" type thing, but rationally and forcefully present to the students a clear vision for why such classes, and why that kind of thinking, matters.
Obama probably never took a math class past his freshman year, and almost certainly didn't have to take much physics. Likewise, many engineers I know, especially at big state schools, will never take a humanities class after freshman English. Either direction is a tragedy.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Women and Their Opinions
NYTimes has an article up about the gender disparity in wikipedia contributors. Apparently only about 15% of contributors are women, with a corresponding gap in terms of content. One enlightening example given is the difference between the articles for Sex and the City and The Sopranos: Sex and the City has a single article with brief synopses while The Sopranos merits an in-depth article for each and every episode.
The article makes me think about two things. One is the general reluctance of women to speak out and give their opinions, especially when doing so involves confrontation or disagreement. I know plenty of brilliant women scientists and engineers who tend to keep quiet during discussions because they're cautious about bringing out unsubstantiated opinions, where us guys just blurt out anything that comes to mind.
There's a trite but illustrative anecdote in this TED talk that Michelle sent me on the lack of women leaders. At the end of a talk the speaker says she'll take one more question and stop, and after that final question all the women put their hands down, but a few men keep their hands up and she winds up answering a few more. In general the girls and women I know tend to be more rule-abiding and less confrontational, less willing to persist in getting what they want. I wonder how much of this is tied into fear of rejection, certainly the girls I know tend to be much more afraid of rejection than the guys. Maybe all that training we get getting shot down by girls isn't such a bad thing after all...
The other thing the article reminded me of is what I like to call the paradox of democratic participation: in open, ostensibly fully democratic social organizations decision-making gets dominated by opinionated minorities. The few people who care and are willing to push for what they want wind up getting their way. My favorite story is a (possibly apocryphal) one that we were told in government class in high school. Subsidies for a type of wool for winter coats were set at $100 dollars per farm, meaning a few cents per head for the population at large. Since a wool farmer has $100 of incentive to keep the subsidy and an individual taxpayer only a few cents to kill it, the subsidies stayed for a long time, even after most people in the US stopped using that wool for winter coats and the largest consumer turned out to be the Soviet Army.
Wikipedia it seems has run into this same kind of effect, where the vast majority of contributions are made by an opinionated minority of editors. The people who have the time and willpower to obsess about tiny details of a TV series are the ones who dominate the articles. To a certain extent this is necessary for quality control, the other problem with true democracy is that you wind up with a few people who wind up making decisions and taking responsibility because other people just don't want to do it or can't. But this also has the effect of limiting participation and reducing the active population to the obsessive few who care. Maybe that's why internet forums are dominated by blowhards and trolls, and since (generalizing, but on average true) women tend to be a small minority of the kind of person who will fight to the death over trivial details of obscure fact, that may also be a limit on their wikipedia participation.
The article makes me think about two things. One is the general reluctance of women to speak out and give their opinions, especially when doing so involves confrontation or disagreement. I know plenty of brilliant women scientists and engineers who tend to keep quiet during discussions because they're cautious about bringing out unsubstantiated opinions, where us guys just blurt out anything that comes to mind.
There's a trite but illustrative anecdote in this TED talk that Michelle sent me on the lack of women leaders. At the end of a talk the speaker says she'll take one more question and stop, and after that final question all the women put their hands down, but a few men keep their hands up and she winds up answering a few more. In general the girls and women I know tend to be more rule-abiding and less confrontational, less willing to persist in getting what they want. I wonder how much of this is tied into fear of rejection, certainly the girls I know tend to be much more afraid of rejection than the guys. Maybe all that training we get getting shot down by girls isn't such a bad thing after all...
The other thing the article reminded me of is what I like to call the paradox of democratic participation: in open, ostensibly fully democratic social organizations decision-making gets dominated by opinionated minorities. The few people who care and are willing to push for what they want wind up getting their way. My favorite story is a (possibly apocryphal) one that we were told in government class in high school. Subsidies for a type of wool for winter coats were set at $100 dollars per farm, meaning a few cents per head for the population at large. Since a wool farmer has $100 of incentive to keep the subsidy and an individual taxpayer only a few cents to kill it, the subsidies stayed for a long time, even after most people in the US stopped using that wool for winter coats and the largest consumer turned out to be the Soviet Army.
Wikipedia it seems has run into this same kind of effect, where the vast majority of contributions are made by an opinionated minority of editors. The people who have the time and willpower to obsess about tiny details of a TV series are the ones who dominate the articles. To a certain extent this is necessary for quality control, the other problem with true democracy is that you wind up with a few people who wind up making decisions and taking responsibility because other people just don't want to do it or can't. But this also has the effect of limiting participation and reducing the active population to the obsessive few who care. Maybe that's why internet forums are dominated by blowhards and trolls, and since (generalizing, but on average true) women tend to be a small minority of the kind of person who will fight to the death over trivial details of obscure fact, that may also be a limit on their wikipedia participation.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Public Service Announcement
After some consideration, I've decided to start using this blog to put up my thoughts on shit. In other words, start using it as a blog instead of a dump for links. You have been warned. If you don't want to see this crap, better unfollow now while you can. :-)
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Facebook and more
Courtesy of The Atlantic and the NY Review of books comes this interesting analysis of the new Facebook movie and the Facebook phenomenon and a rebuttal of said article. Both posts are good reads, although I disagree with their fundamental conclusions. I don't think Zadie Smith really understands how Facebook is used, and like everyone else on the Facebook bandwagon really gives it way too much credit for shaping our beliefs and habits. Likewise, I think the Atlantic blogger is a bit off base in his analysis of Zadie's position as well. I don't think she's really worried about bad writing...
The ever reliable NY Times blogs gives us this article on brains and metaphors and how the brain uses the same structure to process philosophically similar yet fundamentally different things. In a similar vein, there's a post up on IO9 about the Bouba Kiki effect. Since "sharpness" is a frequency effect (take the Fourier transform of a sharp signal, visual or auditory, and there's a lot of high frequency components), it makes sense that the brain would use similar or the same bits to process high frequency objects versus low frequency ones.
The ever reliable NY Times blogs gives us this article on brains and metaphors and how the brain uses the same structure to process philosophically similar yet fundamentally different things. In a similar vein, there's a post up on IO9 about the Bouba Kiki effect. Since "sharpness" is a frequency effect (take the Fourier transform of a sharp signal, visual or auditory, and there's a lot of high frequency components), it makes sense that the brain would use similar or the same bits to process high frequency objects versus low frequency ones.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Porco Russo
Very cool hand-drawn manga that was the original story/inspiration behind Porco Russo: to be found here.
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