Oh who cares about truth
Okay so people like rationalists and humanists and similar are supposed to value reason and truth and accuracy and getting things right, right? Or am I confused.
I ask because of some comments on Jeremy’s post on The British Humanist Association’s opinion poll. They make me wonder.
So, less of this ivory tower disdain, please, for the honest labours of those who are trying to defend the secular principle in the face of sustained attack by the most religious government for over 100 years…In the real world of politics you cannot always be academically nice – your opponents will make mincemeat of you if you try…On rationality and truth – come down out of your ivory tower! The BHA is a campaigning organisation, not a university department.
So the response to criticisms of a flawed poll is to say that such concerns are ivory tower disdain, being academically nice, the result of high-altitude occupation of that ivory tower, confusion between campaigning and a university department? In other words, criticism of a flawed poll is pedantic and (as it were) elitist, and campaigning organizations needn’t and even shouldn’t worry about rationality and truth? But if rationality and truth aren’t the issue – then what is? Why are they humanists at all? Are they just allergic to communion wafers or something?
This comment is if anything even odder.
As a Marketing professional, I notice something distasteful about the not so subtle prejudice against marketing in the casual dismissing of a professional study. Yes, I’m aware that the profession has a mixed reputation but Philosophers and Sociologists, are in no position to throw stones either. On a professional level, I would expect you to rally to the support of fellow professionals, undertaking quantitative research to support the defence of the secular freedoms which we have enjoyed to-date.
Five uses of the word ‘profession’ or ‘professional’ in four lines, and the whole concept deployed as some sort of loyalty imperative; I find that very strange. Why are professionals supposed to rally to the support of fellow professionals? Is that how the world is carved up? Do all professionals support each other? And what exactly is a ‘professional’ anyway? And why is it seen as some sort of hurrah-word?
Jeremy replied to the replies, and asked this question among others:
[W]hether people should applaud quantitative data depends (partly) on whether the data is any good. This poll’s data is hopeless. Therefore, it should not be applauded. Do you think that we should applaud the quantitative data that predicted a win for Thomas Dewey in 1948 US Presidential Election? It’s a famous polling error. Truman, having won, appeared on the news holding a copy of the Chicago Tribune, which had printed “Dewey Beats Truman” on its front page on the basis of polling data.
Yeah, it’s a famous polling error all right, which I mentioned in my comment on the first post. That famous polling error was part of the background of my childhood; it was my uncle’s outfit that made it most conspicuously, and the mistake haunted them. They bent every nerve to figure out how they’d got it wrong, they revamped everything, and they sweated bullets over subsequent elections. I hung out there once on the evening of a presidential election – it was like being at NASA during a mission: hours of huge tension, followed by shrieks of euphoria. But what they did not do was shrug and pout and say it was no big deal. They didn’t bother murmuring about academic niceties or ivory towers, they just turned everything upside down to correct the mistake. (They probably turned my father upside down. He was their director of statistics. Hmm…)
Julian makes much the same point on the New Humanist blog.
Is it really the case that none of my fellow humanists can see and admit that this poll was frankly flaky and there is a real issue here of how much a movement committed to rationality can be prepared to say, “let’s not worry too much about the niceties of truth – let’s just get campaigning.”
Well exactly.
Oh, good point, I didn’t catch that.
In the famous words of Tonto:
Who’s we, Kemosabe?
Actually, I’ve read that again and I’m really quite annoyed.
The reason I come to B&W, the reason I enjoy the works of Dawkins, Goldacre (PBUH), PZ and others is not primarily because I share their world view, but because I relish the way they eviscerate sloppy argument, fudged evidence, and sleight of stat.
Substitute ‘Christianity’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ or ‘Scientology’ for ‘Humanism’ in that phrase and it makes as much sense.
If Mr Pollock is in the business of winning arguments and never mind the finer points, then we’re not on the same side.
“If Mr Pollock is in the business of winning arguments and never mind the finer points, then we’re not on the same side.”
This is why this matters. It’s not that there are not other dodgy opinion polls (because of course there are). It is because the BHA – a group presumably dedicated to reason, good enquiry, etc – seem not to be concerned that they have fallen so short of what are presumably their own standards.
Well, yeah.
I wonder if the ‘never mind accuracy, we have to stick together and win’ line is just something grabbed in the heat of the moment, or if it’s a genuine and longstanding commitment. Let’s hope it’s the former, and that they snap out of it.
Terrible poll. The first question alone. “Scientific and other evidence…” – what other evidence? Do philosophical musings count? Religious experience? Witnessing miracles? So, anyway, we’d have “Evidence provides the best way to understand the universe.” Hmmm, yeah, right, I guess. But this does not at all conflict with a hypothetical standpoint that “Religious beliefs are needed for a complete understanding of the universe.” If “a complete understanding of the universe” even makes sense. I guess that if we had one, we’d never know.
The second question excludes just about a mountain of other options. “Human nature” as in individual human nature? What about conventional social rules, instilled by education, upbringing? Perhaps I believe that originally religious teachings are necessary to understand right and wrong, but that these can be “secularized”. Or perhaps I don’t believe there is an objective right and wrong at all – an option taken into account in the third question, but not in this one.
With the last one, options one and three are both compatible with humanist and religious outlooks – and option two with neither.
I’m a tad worried with the 15% of the British population who believe right and wrong to be a matter of personal preference.
“As a Marketing professional, I notice something distasteful about the not so subtle prejudice against marketing in the casual dismissing of a professional study. Yes, I’m aware that the profession has a mixed reputation but Philosophers and Sociologists, are in no position to throw stones either.”
Priceless. I am a professional person myself. I have been a person all my life, and I flatter myself that by now I must be rather good at it. As it happens, my office is now adjacent to the marketing department, many of whom are, I assume, Marketing professionals, or possibly marketing professionals. To suggest that marketing professionals have a mixed reputation is analogous to saying that Timur the Lame has a mixed reputation – true but completely missing the point. Marketing professionals are to intellectual honesty as Timur was to pacifism, they approve of it in others. As to philosophers and sociologists being in no position to throw metaphorical stones in the hothouse of opinion polling, that is an unsupported assertion so diametrically opposed to the obvious that only a marketing professional is likely to fail to see its absurdity.
“Why are professionals supposed to rally to the support of fellow professionals? Is that how the world is carved up?”
Yes, the world is all carved up and shared out only between the professionals They are all eating and sharing with each other only – the juices and delicious contents of the big fat joint. Dare any pitiable scavenger try to get in their way to pick off their bones as they will all gang up and devour same.
Truth and honesty like the remnants of the bones are there, by them only to be sucked.
As none of this dialogue has been in either Latin or Greek and Cicero hasn’t been quoted once I don’t see what its got to do with humanism anyway.
But I entirely endorse the concerns expressed by Jeremy, Julian and Ophelia. All that cr*p about combatting theocracy just looks like boo words being used to hide acknowledgement of a right royal cock-up.
In any case, to take one example, when Jonathan Swift disliked the policies of the English Government he didn’t send for MORI, he wrote ‘A Modest Proposal’. To come up to date, Dawkins has done more single-handed for the rationalist cause than the whole of the BHA on a good day. You don’t need numbers, you just need good arguments, a few good persons and a lot of perseverance.
Speaking as a professional professional, in a real profession [we even have professors, you know] I object to the use of the word ‘professional’ by marketing hacks as if it meant something in their context. If people need stuff, they buy it. Marketing is about persuading people they need stuff they actually don’t – because if they did, they wouldn’t need it to be ‘marketed’ to them… To persuade someone of a false proposition, it follows inevitably that falsehood is required. Serpents, the lot of them.
“Marketing is about persuading people they need stuff they actually don’t – because if they did, they wouldn’t need it to be ‘marketed’ to them”
Ah yes, but you see that is where the professionalism comes in. That bridging of the gap between not needing something and being persuaded to buy it – that is a task for professionals, and highly-trained professionals at that.
They’re all mixed up together, you know – advertising, PR, polling, and politics, in a horrible sleazy manipulative truth-indifferent tangle.
Marketing? A profession? Mere Babbittry; it’s Trade.
Oh but Babbitt was a professional too. Real estate agents excuse me realtors are very much professionals. Why, next you’ll be telling us that Motivational Speaking isn’t a profession!
Excuse me, was there not an hiatus of punctuation in your preceding comment? And isn’t a professional just someone with a profession, and isn’t a profession simply something that one’s activities or speech acts profess? Anyway, what’s wid da Babbitt? Are we back to that epitome of pulchritude Jessica Babbitt? Errr, spam? No, I really am on topic, I was just getting around to noting that if motivational speakers profess to be professionals then moti… OK, leaving now, no need to call the police.