Is academia a cult?

Bug Girl thinks so. I'm not sure how serious she's being, as I don't read her blog regularly, but her post is certainly funny, interesting and suggestive. Assuming she is being serious, I can only say I'm somewhat skeptical. It has certainly not been my experience of academia and it would surprise (and really worry) me if many people did experience it that way.

Skeptics' Circle #81, the leap day edition

Random fact: on my calculation (which could very well be wrong), the next time leap day will fall on a Friday is 2036. Some way off...

Anyway, the 81st edition of the Skeptics' Circle is out at Conspiracy Factory. Contributions to check out: Rebecca at Skepchick making fun of Oprah; Archaeoporn reflecting on the moral dilemmas of ethnomedicine (which has some bearing on traditional medicine in South Africa); Podblack Cat's terrific, challenging, thoughtful post on strategies for skepticism; and 3QuarksDaily's guest piece by John Allen Paulo.

Update: part 2 and part 3 of Podblack Cat's "Strategies for Skepticism".

The angriest book review, ever...

So I was browsing around Amazon.com for books to order and I came across a customer review by one Michael J. Mcdermott of The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War by David Smith. Writes Mr. Mcdermott (in part):

A pompous, bigoted, self serving, atheist political tirade with nothing new to add to the debate, save a sophomoric level of inept 'scholarship' in service of a transparent sham of propaganda and sophistry. In his sad excuse for recycling the propaganda of the radical leftist / gender feminist / homosex lobby, malignantly narcissistic pseudo-pundit David Smith spends far more time telling his readers how objective he intends to be, than actually engaging in any sort of open minded investigation. In doing so, he provides no new insights in to his alleged subject of war, but does open a window on the preening self aggrandizing egoism that fuels the Thought Police in the pathetic farce that passes itself as 'higher' education; and particularly the rigidly narrow and dogmatic agenda of conformity in 'Academentia' better known as the "Pander or Perish / Cannibal Soup" social engineering pogrom.

Wow... Read the rest of it, if you dare.

So the Rapture DIDN'T happen in 2007

Note: this started its life as a Facebook note, I'm not quite sure why I never posted it here. Google Cache no longer archives Corbitt's nonsense, but I promise that's what she said!

While reading a list of the Top 100 Quotes from crazy Christian fundamentalists, I tied to follow a link to a website that claimed the Rapture would happen in 2007. Unsurprisingly, the website is now down - but thanks to Google Cache we can still get a glimpse. The person responsible is one Shelby Corbitt who wrote a book that supposedly is:

a prophetic message from God for the world. Everyone must know and will know this warning from Him. This book tells of events to prepare for and a date that the rapture of the church will happen. Catastrophic events are about to happen, just like in the days of Noah. God is saying, "Are you rapture ready?" This message is for every single person living in this present day and hour.

As some of you might have noticed, the rapture did not in fact happen during 2007... so a bit of backpedaling was in order. Corbitt posted the following on January 1st, 2008:

We made it to 2008. I am extremely disappointed that I was wrong about the rapture. I apologize for any disappointment I caused others. I apologized on my main page. I will leave it up for a few days before I take the website down. I want to thank the 1000's of emails I have gotten over the past few days, expressing the gratitude to the website. So many of you have said that even if the prophecy did not happen the website helped them to get back in touch with God and get their lives straight. I am so glad that good came from this whole ordeal. Several people want to know what I intend to do. I am a nurse so I will go back to work, unless I have another option come to me that sounds better. I really do not have much to say at this point. God bless you all and have a Happy New Year!!

But, fear not: there is already another website up which claims that, rapture wise, 2008's the charm.

Being out

When I started this blog, I didn't quite know how it was going to turn out but it's certainly surprised me in some ways. In the beginning I thought I was going to blog exclusively about specific academic papers in social and evolutionary psychology but, for numerous reasons, it didn't work out that way at all. I soon realized - and admitted - that my interests cannot be contained, that I can't not blog about everything I'm interested in. I have, however, been a bit cagey about one issue: my atheism. (Yes, I am an atheist. And proud of it.) For some reason I thought that, if I discussed atheism, my blog would no longer qualify as a science blog - and I most certainly want it to be that. As a result, I would write up entries about atheistic issues and then end up posting them as Facebook notes instead of on this blog. But it occurred to me that plenty of paradigmatic science bloggers - PZ Myers comes to mind - discuss atheism/religion issues and are still regarded as science bloggers. So phooey to being cagey. Don't fear: this will always remain an academic blog. I won't ever discuss, say, my favorite Pancetta pasta recipe or drone on about my love life.

(Note the new links in my blog roll and the shiny scarlet A, right. See also Greta Christina's rationale for including the A on her blog.)

Shermer on the evolutionary psychology of corporate behavior

As I have mentioned before, Michael Shermer has recently become enamored with evolutionary psychology and it’s really showing in his Scientific American columns. He may, however, have become a tad too enthusiastic for his own good. In a recent piece, “Do all companies have to be evil?”, Shermer applies evolutionary psychology to the corporate world. His conclusion, gratifyingly, is that the “greed is good” mindset (Objectivism, for example) not only does not breed success but actually leads to failure. Argues Shermer,

When we apply these evolutionary findings to economic life, we learn that Enron and the Gordon Gekko “Greed Is Good” ethic are the exception and that Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto is the rule. Two conditions must be present to accentuate the latter: first, internal trust reinforced by personal relationships, and, second, external rules supported by social institutions.

Shermer then goes on to compare the corporate cultures of Enron and Google in some detail, thereby illustrating his contention about trust and social institutions. This is all very interesting (and certainly worth a read) but I have a few misgivings. What follows are a couple of unconnected observations.

Firstly, Shermer seems to fail to appreciate that to evaluate a hypothesis rigorously it needs to be tested against data not used to come up with it in the first place. That is, if we hypothesize x based on observations y, to test x we need to compare its predictions to a different set of observations z - we can’t use y again because that would be circular. So it makes me worry when Shermer says

By studying how modern companies work, we can gain insights into the evolutionary underpinnings of our morality, including concepts such as reciprocity, altruism and fairness. When we apply these evolutionary findings to economic life…

Is he using human behavior in corporate settings as data for evolutionary psychology or is he using evolutionary psychology to explain human corporate behavior? Perhaps I am being a bit unfair, Shermer has limited space and the above is somewhat tangential, but it remains an important methodological point.

Secondly, it is important to note that in most of the article, Shermer is speculating, not doing science or reporting on established science. For example, he explains Google’s success at creating a productive corporate culture by invoking egalitarianism:

A horizontal corporate structure [like Google’s] generates an atmosphere of equalitarianism and nonelitism that taps into the environment of our Paleolithic ancestors, who evolved in what are believed to have been largely egalitarian bands and tribes.

This seems plausible enough and, sure, we infer from the egalitarian cultures of current hunter-gatherers that our Pleistocene ancestors had similarly egalitarian ways, but we don’t really know what the significance of this is. Numerous successful organizations – the American military comes to mind – have decidedly vertical structures. And soldiers too have ancestors who we infer lived in egalitarian cultures. So what does this “tap into” business really amount to? Some actual science would have been nice – plausibility is not a sufficiently high bar, support from serious academic studies is what Shermer’s hypotheses need. (When n=2 [Google + Enron] we can’t be really sure of anything). More importantly, Shermer should have explicitly warned his readers he was speculating. To be clear: I have nothing against speculation; it’s a valuable and important exercise. But it is vital to distinguish carefully between speculation and fact, between speculative extensions of theory and well-established theory.

A small matter also annoyed me a bit in the article: Shermer uses the term “evolution” in several distinct senses without clear distinction. There is vague metaphysical evolution, cultural evolution, biological evolution, and many others. Shermer invites misunderstanding by not being clear about which sense he’s referring to.

Lastly, Shermer’s contention that Google is a paragon of goodness (and thus an illustration of his evolutionary speculations) is vulnerable to the observation that the company doesn’t always behave as advertised. Google, let’s not forget, conveniently disregarded its principles for access to the Chinese market (among many other lapses, as Shermer himself documents). But his response to this problem is as lame as it comes, “Controversies of this nature are inevitable for any company that grows as rapidly as Google has, and no matter how lofty a company philosophy may be, perfection will always be an unattainable goal.” Human aren’t perfect. Great. But we knew that already. What happened to Shermer’s hypothesis that there is an evolutionary reason that “don’t be evil” breeds business success? Scientists don’t get to rationalize away inconvenient facts. (To be fair, this problem doesn’t implicate the contention that aspects of the “don’t be evil” philosophy cultivate an internal corporate structure conducive to business success. Shermer, however, unwisely defends a broader hypothesis at the end of the article).

TED update

I just found out the TED prizes will be streamed live online tonight (28 February) starting at 5:15 pm US-Pacific time, the speakers are: Karen Armstrong, Dave Eggers, and Neil Turok.

Also, Wired has released (warning: NSFW and disturbing) new photos from Abu Ghraib prison that they obtained in advance from Philip Zimbardo, who is scheduled to give TEDTalk later today. They also conducted an interview with him about people's capacity for evil and why the Abu Ghraib guards acted as they did.

On a much lighter note, Wired continues its coverage of the TED conference with a report on "surfer dude" (and physicist) Garrett Lisi's simple unified field theory.

Manto and traditional health quakery in South Africa

I lied in my previous post, I have to Lazy Link yet again, because über-skeptic Steven Novella (one of my heroes) has taken on a topic close to my heart: anti-scientific medicine in South Africa. (For those of my readers who don't know, I am South African myself, residing in Durban). Novella roasts our incompetent minister of health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, for assuring traditional healers they need not bother with clinical trails or evidence. While I'm not sure I buy Novella's analysis of President Mbeki's reasons for firing Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, everything else he says is spot on. Rhetoric notwithstanding, science most certainly is not "Western" in any sense other than key elements of it having been invented in Western Europe in the 17th century. And, importantly, emotionally appealing though it may be in South Africa, the argument from antiquity remains fallacious.

This post also again brings to my attention that *I* have failed to address key skeptical questions in South Africa. That's certainly something I intend to remedy.