One terrific chapter in Thinking Fast and Slow is 21, Intuitions vs Formulas. There Kahneman tells us a brutal unsettling truth, which is that for certain purposes in certain situations, algorithms do better than expert judgement. Thick detailed rich experiential knowledge does worse than a boring quick little formula. A psychologist called Paul Meehl made this claim more than 50 years ago and the research he inspired is still pouring out. Clinical psychologists don’t like the claim! (You can see the insurance people licking their chops, although Kahneman hasn’t mentioned that as far as I’ve read.)

This is about prediction, and for a moment I consoled myself with “oh well just for prediction…” but really, that won’t do. Prediction is the whole point of having a theory of mind, isn’t it.

It’s what people mean when they complain about “scientism,” I think – they’re resisting the horrible idea that a few questions could get a better handle on them than years of experience and conversation and deep thinking. We all want to be Isabel Archer, not a handful of ticked boxes.

Why are experts inferior to algorithms? One reason, which Meehl suspected, is that experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it reduces validity. Simple combinations of features are better. [p 224]

Isn’t that awful? That’s awful! All our beautiful complicatedness, tossed out the window because simple combinations of features are better. We’re not so complicated! The final scene in the movie, when the cops have shot us down, is no longer “I ain’t so tough,” it’s “I ain’t so complicated.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’m just going to keep quoting from Thinking Fast and Slow a lot, because it’s that good. So expect it as a regular thing.

It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task. Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse. In the absence of valid cues, intuitive “hits” are due either to luck or to lies. If you find this conclusion surprising, you still have a lingering belief that intuition is magic. Remember this rule: intuitions cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment. [p 241]

Good, eh?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Update: They’re choosing another date.

Brilliant. Someone has scheduled a “Secular Leaders Summit” in Los Angeles for…May 17th.

The secular movement made tremendous advances in 2012 as atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and skeptics came “Out” and identified against the traditional religious majority.  With the influx of prospective members, secular communities need to communicate and collaborate to manage the new opportunities and growing challenges.

We need to make 2013 the year of “Organize.” Together we can establish linkages, share best practices and expand the universe of available opportunities. The focus is on communication and collaboration to expand the movement.

Due to available space we ask you limit your representatives to two per group.

Please save the date, bring your best practices and ideas for the future.

Lunch will be provided.

I like that “please save the date.” Dude (it is a dude), I did save the date. A long time ago. I did save the date, for a conference that’s already scheduled. Save the date yourself, bro. (Hint: there are some secular leaders attending that already-scheduled conference. Quite a few of them.)

This was in a mass emailing from someone I don’t know; I don’t see anything about it online yet. I wonder if they’ll figure it out and change the date. Or perhaps it was deliberate.

The focus is on communication and collaboration to expand the movement. Right. Good start.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Seen #INeedMasculismBecause? I saw it on Twitter an hour or two ago and clicked on the hashtag and laughed and laughed, because it’s all full of hilarious jokes by Elyse Anders and Sarah Moglia and Jamie Kilstein and other funny people.

David Futrelle fills us in.

 a bunch of Men’s Rights Redditors and other MRAs, inspired by a post on 4Chan, decided to swarm Twitter with #INeedMasculismBecause tweets in response to the #INeedFeminismBecause hashtag. Feminists responded by outswarming the MRAs, flooding their new hashtag with often quite hilarious parodies of MRAspeak, as well as some just plain ridiculousness.

Here are a few I collected from the top ones.

 There are a lot more.

Update: Well I need to add a few more.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A comment that was just posted on a 2005 post about Irish industrial schools. The commenter is looking for infomation, so I want her comment to get more eyes.

Catherine Mitrenas writes:

My Mother was incarcerated in this establishment from two years old until sixteen years old. Her brother went to a separate orphanage and they did not see each other again until they were sixteen years old. He was only one when they separated. Their Father was a sailor and their Mother died when they were infants. From what I have read recently I now wonder if my Mother’s mother did die as they do not know where her grave is, how she died or even a photograph. I would like anyone that knew my Mum or her family to get in touch with any information that would help me find some of her long lost family. I did not realise that this orphanage was so cruel. I now understand why my Mother has been the way she has. It has brought tears to my eyes for not understanding her pain. The Farrell family: Thomas Farrell. Two children Mary Bridgett and Thomas. Do not know the exact dates but must have been around 1936 onwards approx. This would be greatly appreciated.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

John Scalzi has been studying our friend Bjarte Foshaug – he’s adopted Bjarte’s excellent wheeze of donating to rights groups by way of reply to haters.

John Scalzi is the author of several books, including the Old Man’s War series and Redshirts, published in the States by Tor and the UK by Gollancz. He’s also the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Fed up of being constantly targeted on his website by one particular individual and his followers, Scalzi decided to take action, pledging US$5 every time “the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit in question posts an entry on his site in which he uses my name (or one of his adorable nicknames for me)”.

Scalzi put a ceiling on his “troll tip jar” of US$1,000, figuring that gave his bête noir 200 opportunities to abuse him over the coming year, and said he’d give the cash to four charities: RAINN, America’s largest anti-sexual violence organization; Emily’s List, dedicated to electing pro-choice Democratic women to office; the Human Rights Campaign, which works for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equal Rights; and NAACP: America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.

That’s the ticket!

A novel enough way to tackle the trolls, for sure, but what happened next was somewhat astonishing: Scalzi’s friends, Twitter followers and readers asked if they could jump in with pledges too. Many of his friends are high-profile authors and industry types – Will Wheaton, the actor who played Wesley Crusher in TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a writer in his own right, was one of many who promised to match Scalzi’s US$1,000 pledge.

By the early hours of this morning, UK time,  the pledges for Scalzi’s chosen charities had grown to US$50,000.

Very good. Just one thing though – let’s not be thinking of this as a great way to raise money for rights organizations. I don’t volunteer to be a target for the purpose. Sorry, but no.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’m reading a wicked review of Alain de Botton’s new book in The New Republic, by Victoria Beale. She explains about “The School of Life”…

The self-declared mission of the School is to provide an enterprise that will “direct you toward a variety of useful ideas … guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, nourish and console.” The School’s shop has a few lightly stocked book-shelves (Oliver James, Paul Theroux, Italo Calvino, and, of course, the complete de Botton bibliography), while in its downstairs classroom, the School hosts talks that are a mixture of book-promos (“Steven Pinker on Violence and Humanity” to sell copies of The Better Angels of Our Nature), schedule fillers (an eight-week course on “Mindfulness,”), and champagne tastings…

At a more moderate cost, the publications from The School of Life imprint further the same basic project: bring brisk, philosophically inflected practicality to universal dilemmas. There have been six books published in the series so far, one written by de Botton, the rest adopting his authorial technique. How to Stay Sane by Philippa Perry, epitomizes the worst tendencies of this formula: it amounts to little more than philosopher name-dropping with poorly written exegesis. “Socrates stated that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’” she writes. “This is an extreme stance, but I do believe that the continuing development of a non-judgemental, self-observing part of ourselves is crucial for our wisdom and sanity.” The whole book is composed of this kind of grinding obviousness, bizarrely sprinkled with a King Lear line, a Martin Buber quote, or a Wagner reference.

Perry’s sentences are often so banal as to be parodic: “A group of people I find I always learn from are children, as they can offer us fresh eyes on the world and a new perspective”; “When I go away on holiday to a new place I feel refreshed by having been stimulated by new sights, smells, environments and culture”; “Each of us comes from a mother and a father, or from a sperm bank, and each of us was brought up by our parents or by people standing in for them.” The clunking truisms seem intended to give the book a straightforward tone, but instead leave the prose sounding lobotomized.

I found that too funny not to share.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I didn’t know that South Korea has the highest per capita rate of plastic surgery in the world. Somebody has to have that, naturally, but I’m slightly surprised that’s who does. I might have guessed the US does, if anyone had asked – I suppose because of lots of rich people and lots of advertising, lots of emulation and envy of movie stars and fashion models, lots of consumerism and the values that go with it, lots of reactionary bullshit about women floating around – reasons like that. But no, it’s South Korea.

One in five women in Seoul have undergone some kind of procedure. Most popular: Eyelid surgery, to make the eyes “more Western,” and getting your jawbone shaved or chiseled down for a less-square and more V-shaped look.

Sroll up and down that Jezebel post and look at the before and after photos.

Notice something?

The women all look much more delicate and fragile.

Think about that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Nine women shot to death in Kano for attempting to prevent children from getting polio. Nine.

In the first attack in Kano the polio vaccinators were shot dead by gunmen who drove up on a motor tricycle.

Thirty minutes later gunmen targeted a clinic outside Kano city as the vaccinators prepared to start work.

Some Nigerian Muslim leaders have previously opposed polio vaccinations, claiming they could cause infertility.

On Thursday, a controversial Islamic cleric spoke out against the polio vaccination campaign, telling people that new cases of polio were caused by contaminated medicine.

Such opposition is a major reason why Nigeria is one of just three countries where polio is still endemic.

Nine women murdered, and who knows how many children doomed to get polio in the future.

According to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, there were 121 cases of polio in Nigeria last year, compared to 58 in Pakistan and 37 in Afghanistan.

And compared to zero in the rest of the world.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Michael Kimmel wrote a great article on the Steubenville gang rape a couple of weeks ago.

As I found in my interviews with more than 400 young men for my book Guyland, in the aftermath of these sorts of events – when high-status high school athletes commit felonies, especially gang rape – they are surrounded and protected by their fathers, their school administrations and their communities. These out-of-control, rapacious thugs are our school’s heroes — “our guys,” as the gang rapists at Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey were called nearly two decades ago. The players themselves hold to a code of silence, the omerta of sexual assault: No one ever rats out a fellow bro. The parents, the school and the community circle wagons in a culture of protection around the boys.

It’s often the girl herself, and her parents, who are vilified and receive death threats for daring to expose the crime in the first place. Raped boys, too, dare not complain: A few years ago, after rookies on the Mepham High School (Long Island) football team were sodomized with broom handles, golf balls and pine cones in a pre-season hazing ritual, the rookies’ parents got anonymous death threats for standing up for their brutalized sons.

This seems like a less than ideal arrangement.

At the moment, we’re hearing a chorus of adults saying “boys will be boys”– surely the most depressing four words spoken about members of my gender. Haven’t you noticed that we always say that when boys have done something really bad? We shrug our collective shoulders in resignation – nothing we can do about it. How come we don’t say, “Oh wow, a man walked on the moon – boys will be boys!” Or “A man won the Novel Prize – boys will be boys!” “A man is working to cure cancer … ” you get the idea.  It’s a pernicious type of male bashing to assume that boys can do no better than be wild rapacious animals. We can do better than this – and we can insist on better from boys as well.

What could be more “misandrist”? Why aren’t the MRAs all over it? Why are they all over feminists instead?

The Steubenville 2

did what they did because they felt entitled to, because they knew they could get away with it. Because they knew that their coaches, their families, their friends, their teammates and the police department–indeed, the entire town would rally around them and protect them from the consequences of what they’ve done.

Because the Steubenville 2 is really the Steubenville 18,437 (I’ve subtracted the girl victim and her parents). Until the community rallies around the victim and not the perpetrators, the shame of gang rape is on them all. All.

The global public outcry in India has begun to change their public conversation about gang rape. Citizens of Steubenville have a moral existential choice about where they stand. Whose side will they be on?

I have an educated guess, but I’ll keep it to myself.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Nahla Mahmoud went on Channel 4′s 4thought.tv programme to talk about her opinions on ‘What does Sharia Law have to offer Britain’ and found herself the only person out of seven interviewed who was against sharia and for secularism.

My interview has triggered a debate in the Sudanese media, both at home and in the diaspora, from which campaigns have emerged inciting people against me calling me a ‘Kafira’ (infidel) and ‘Murtadda’ (left Islam) . I guess Sudanese government officials have time to watch Channel 4 because the Sudanese Armed Forces’ Facebook page posted my picture declaring me an infidel and apostate. Who knew that my private beliefs could denigrate a country’s government, religion, and armed forces?!

I can’t imagine why she would prefer a secular state…

Another issue is marital rape, honour killings and domestic violence: in Pakistan, there are 300 cases of acid burnt women with no charges pressed against their husbands. Here in the UK, a study reported by the One Law for All campaign shows that 4 out of 10 women in Sharia court cases were party to civil injunctions against their husbands. The One Law for All campaign as well as other groups like Secularism Is a Women’s Issue are among the frontline defenders campaigning against Sharia courts, fighting for women’s rights and demanding gender equality.

You might almost think that women had special reasons to care about secularism and that secularism has every reason to be welcoming to women. Almost, but then someone would come along and tell you otherwise.

But Islam is hard on children, too.

Other discrimination against children that must be considered is the lack of exposure to different ideas and thoughts. Children from an Islamic background are often taught to close their minds to new ideas and some are brought up to hate their Jewish, Christian and Hindu classmates, as well as any gay students in their class.

In addition to my own experiences at school in Sudan, one can grab any school curriculum from an Islamic state see how it restricts critical thinking and any questioning of religious doctrine. Evolutionary theory is banned from most educational systems in Islamic states, as it contradicts the creationist story in the Quran. Sudanese professor, Faroque Ahmed Ibrahim, stated in his open letter that teaching evolution at University of Khartoum was among the main reasons he was tortured and imprisoned by the Sudanese government. Moreover, little girls are often taught from birth that they are ‘lesser’ human beings, which results in lower self-esteem and lack of confidence later in life. It is however, the case with most other faith-based schools and education including Christianity and Judaism which, sadly, have the same ‘holy-centralised’ ideology.

It’s hard on gays, non-Muslims, atheists.

Cases such as Iranian Ali Ghorabat for apostasy, Jafar Kazemi and Mohammad Ali Haji Aghaee for enmity against God, Sudanese theologian Mahmoud M. Taha for his progressive Islamic views and Egyptian Nasr H. Abu Zaid for his critical views on the Qur’an show the widespread persecution of people who dare to question blind belief.

This is not a thing of the past: just this month Kuwait jailed Abdel Aziz Mohamed Albaz for criticizing Islam, Saudi Arabia jailed Raif Badawi for his liberal views, Tunisian artist Nadia Jelassi is facing prison for her ‘un-Islamic’ artistic pieces. Countries like Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen implement the death penalty for those who renounce or criticize Islam, but they also punish anyone who is progressive, liberal or wishes to think freely and live a modern, 21st century life.

Being an atheist and an ex-Muslim should have been a private matter for me under a secular state. However, under an ‘Islamic Inquisition’ as fellow secular campaigner Maryam Namazi describes, it became necessary for dissenters, especially those who are persecuted, to publicly air our views and call for equal treatment because this persecution will not end until we stand together and speak out. I chose to speak out on Channel 4 and in many other venues in the UK because I cannot stand by and watch others suffer the same discrimination and persecution that I faced. The current persecution of the five groups I discussed above, both here in the UK and around the world, provide a duty for everyone to stand up for the simple principle: all humans are equal.

Watch Nahla on 4ThoughtTV.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Guest post by Gen, Uppity Ingrate.

It started with an article by Sisonke Msimang, which I will excerpt rather than quote in full.

I read an article on Thursday morning. It said: “The victim had been sliced open from her stomach to her genitals and dumped.” The radio is full of this story. Full of politicians and posers, trying to outdo one another. Like funeral criers. But it will end, the show. And there will be marches and petitions. There will be statements and rage. But it will happen again. Until we are inured to shock. It will happen again. Until our bones are worn into dust and our teeth crushed into the sand. It will happen and happen. Until we invent a way to stop being women. Until we find a way for our blood to no longer bleed between our legs. As long as we exist, we will be raped.

So, no, I will not march. I don’t believe my marching will stop this war. I will cry, as I have been already this morning. And maybe, I will begin to feel my way out of the lurching, heavy knowing after I have spoken with others. With the mothers and the sisters, the brothers and fathers – those like me, who have girls.

There is only this: a dead, hollow knowing that has always been knocking at my heart. From the minute she was born, it fell in step with the rhythm of my breath: to raise a girl in this world, to raise her strong and healthy and proud, to ensure that she survives and then to insist ferociously that she laugh and dance and think and dream, is to choose the most heartbreaking and joyous path. It is to tempt fate every single day, it is to fear that her breath will be strangled by a stranger. It is to live with the horrible possibility that this could be your child.

Anene was raped and mutilated because she was a girl. It was her vagina and her breasts that they wanted to destroy. It was her walk and her talk. It was her girl-ness. These parts of her were broken and sliced and pulled apart, not by monsters, but by friends. Each of her 10 fingers were broken.

When the president of your country (who was re-elected for a second term!) is acquitted of rape because the victim, despite clearly not wanting to have sex, “didn’t say no” and said victim is then hounded and threatened until she had to fled South Africa and seek asylum in the Netherlands and things just go back to their poisonous levels of normal afterwards with no harm no foul kind of attitutes, then yes, I do think that politicizing the issue and forcing the government to take a stance and start seriously implementing strategies (as opposed to just talking about it and making empty promises) may be the first step, in addition to the work done by grassroots activists.

It’s weird, here in South Africa, and really hard to explain. According to many of the important measures, we’re doing really well against sexism. On paper. We have gender equality enshrined as absolute in the constitution and have the third highest female government representation in the world. We have drives for education all children, for helping encouraging girls to get into STEM fields, and women have traditionally been part of the work force (albeit in low-paying, low-status jobs, but still). When we struggled for suffrage for all South Africans, regardless of race, colour or creed, we included women in that catagory *by default*.  Women fill many positions of power, and even the backlash against feminism we see so clearly is not present (or at least not so VOCAL) that I’ve experienced here in South Africa.

Yet the prevailing culture (and I do not mean “culture” as a euphemism for ‘black’ or ‘indigenous’ or the other racist shit people often like to sneak in when they say “culture”, I mean the literal overarching country culture that runs the same shit through all peoples and subcultures of South Africa) is still demonstrably and DEEPLY toxic against women. (On my darker days, I sometimes feel that the reason the MRA and backlash is not so loud here in ZA because their ideals and ‘ideas’ are already mostly realized on a cultural, societal level, here.)

When you add to that the legacy and normalization of violence that’s been woven into the fabric of the country without any noticeable non-violent periods since even before the institutionalization of Apartheid (in fact, since just about the time the Dutch first came to the Cape and colonized…) and the current socio-economic crisis which is actually more of a collapse, where unemployment and EXTREME poverty affects the majority of the country…

Well. I’m not sure how to even *begin* thinking about addressing these problems, which all feed on each other and amplify each other and form a vicious cycle that gets louder and louder and worse and worse every year (it feels like) in a sustainable manner.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The radical feminists are in your streets!

There are lots. See them all.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

You know that video that “mykeru” did a couple of days ago? The one that prompted some stranger to tweet at me that I’m an immoral little twat who should get a fucking hobby? It’s now the featured video at A Voice for Men – with my face on it, looking like a nightmare-idiot, because it caught me in mid-blink.

Fabulous. I love being a target.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)