Medicin-y.

"A woman’s lifetime risk of dying from breast cancer is 2.7 percent without screening. Kerlikowske calculates that a woman who follows the new USPSTF guidelines could drop that risk to 2.0 percent, and one who follows the ACS guidelines may reduce the risk a few decimal places more, to between 1.8 and 1.9 percent. To get these benefits, the USPSTF program requires 13 total mammograms in a woman’s lifetime, and the ACS regimen will result in 20 breast X-rays.

In exchange for these risk reductions, 61 percent of women who have annual mammograms and 42 percent of women who have biennial mammograms will be called back at least once for follow-up tests that reveal they do not have cancer, researchers write in an accompanying paper. The anxiety and stress of such a false alarm is the most common harm, but it’s not the only one.

In its own analysis, the USPSTF calculated that if 1,000 women follow its advice and have a mammogram every other year from age 50 to 74, 146 of them will be subjected to unnecessary breast biopsies and 18 of the 1,000 will be diagnosed and treated for a cancer that would have never harmed them (a problem called overdiagnosis and overtreatment). Women who have mammograms more often, as they would under the ACS guidelines, will experience more of these downsides."

- Notice this is roughly the number of women who are dying of breast cancer at all with this regimen. And the unnecessary treatment rate is way more than the number that are being treated successfully to avoid lethal developments. All of that treatment comes with its own complications and issues, and stress and fear associated with possible diagnosis (even before considering the enormous financial costs it burdens us with to deal with all these unnecessary procedures).

What does this mean "scientifically"?
- We need much better detection methods. Mammograms appear to be little better than junk science as they have way too high of a false positive rate and way too small of a detection rate. It's possible this is a problem of there being a fairly small risk, but the lifetime risk here is significant enough that we should be doing something. This feels a lot like a "this is something" solution rather than a very useful one. You might as well flip a coin if it's close to 50% false positive rates to decide whether your doctor thinks you might have something that needs checked out.

This is often over 50%. A coin flip might be a better option. The author's decision to just forgo them entirely may be the wiser course in the meantime. (I personally like Austria's recommendation of "whatever").

- It might also be that doctors don't have any idea how to use them, or more likely use the data they get in order to help patients making informed decisions about their care and health. This is a widespread problem in medicine and it likely encourages over use of procedures and treatment, particularly of scary things like cancer. Cancer is scary. Thinking you have it, or could get it, is scary. Therefore, as much medical treatment to prevent it as we can afford is what most people think is reasonable in response. This is not actually reasonable as a response to the actual risks of cancer that most women will be afflicted with. Doctors should have a better idea how to discuss this problem sensibly. Also they may need to have some incentive to do so. The incentive right now appears to be closer to "generate breast cancer patients" rather than "prevent/detect/treat actual breast cancer when it appears in my patients".

- Looks a little better at detection relative to false positives after age 50 (not into the "good at it" rates, but significantly better than what we do now). This is essentially when the rest of the developed world even starts bothering with these questions. What might be one reason why they delay is it reduces the excess costs of unnecessary treatment without significantly reducing the number of women who are put at risk (possibly 1/1000).

More comprehensive studies have pointed out that this does not account for the number of women dying of any cancer total. Which is effectively unchanged by mammograms or no mammograms. All the focus on breast cancer may be obscuring other cancers that need to be attended to for the health of women (cervical cancer for instance has similar problems with our current detection regimen).

Or it maybe obscured here because our actual treatment options are quite poor.

- The biggest problem here is that threads in response to these changes in guidelines are inherently based upon anecdotal evidence. "I found a lump and I was 32" is treated as a data point against changing the current system. There are potentially higher risk factors as well (genetics for example). Patients don't really understand these, usually (many women will, but not everyone on an open comment thread does). Doctors might, or at least should, and can screen based upon them. Usually the recommendations allow for these deviations. The political economy problem is that many people will then worry if insurers will pay for it if it is "not recommended".

A note on social media campaigns

I've previously noted my disdain for "awareness" campaigns, of most any type. They are usually harmless. For instance, a childhood cancer campaign involves changing profile photos to those of superheroes. This is fairly benign. Kids usually like superheroes (so do adults, obviously). And there isn't usually a way to do a lot of early detection and interdiction for children and cancers, so we're stuck trying to figure out how to treat it (or if we should, which is even more horrifying to contemplate). So any campaign "increasing awareness" is liable to fund useful research somewhat more rather than funding more "awareness campaigns".

They also are not typically that helpful. It is better that some number of young people are aware of the existence of Boko Haram or the LRA and their activities in Africa. But that has little to say about what we can or should do about those as problems. It was likewise amusing (if typically wasteful) that some number of people learned something about ALS through dumping buckets of ice water on themselves. Whether or not that will materialize into a substantive improvement in the well-being of the people afflicted with it, or future persons, is much less clear. I at least credit people their intentions may be good even if their efforts are shallow and unresponsive to the deeper issues at stake.

Where I see some more recent annoyances is the yearly campaigns involving weird status games on facebook and "breast cancer awareness". Firstly, the status games themselves can involve some insensitive and even harmful postings. Posting a fake pregnancy announcement, a fake sexuality announcement, a fake marriage announcement, and so on, these are not things sensible people should do. Whether or not they "have good intentions". These are potentially quite harmful and at least annoying to say: couples who have experienced infertility or miscarriages, couples that are no longer couples, and maybe people who are in the closet about their sexuality (or gender for that matter). I'm not saying you can't post it, but I am saying I'm going to look askance at the people who do as though they have a problem. Because it seems to me that they might need a few explanations about the nature of reality.

In general, few people are concerned with toilet-related mishaps that they should be shared either. While I'm sure a percentage of the public thought those were amusing, they weren't very interesting amusements. For instance, that video of the Massachusetts man freaking out at seeing a sunfish, that was indirectly interesting, on top of being a series of crazy accented speech and expressions that lends itself to being easily copied for more ordinary purposes than ocean going voyages and the encounters those lend themselves to. Despite these flaws, I do not think people are posting such things maliciously and with the intention to cause grievous harm or annoyance to people like me.

Where I think the biggest problem here is that "breast cancer awareness" is already well past the saturation point. Much of the empirical evidence on treatment and detection of breast cancer suggests that any benefit from "additional awareness" is getting cancelled out by unnecessarily worrying people and of course, the unpleasant varieties of treatment that we subject women to upon detection. We are all pretty aware by this point that women have breasts, and some women tend to get breast cancers. So this kind of awareness should not be a major concern for charitable work or social awareness campaigning and the like. Many of these public campaigns are effectively more about this "awareness" activity than they are about the treatment and detection of cancer.

What is of more pressing concern is likely research into better screening methodologies (genetic screening data for example seems promising), and research into better and more effective treatment for those cases that require treatment, in particular for advanced cases. These are not things that can be directly provided through "awareness", and in some cases are not really available or fully in use yet. What happens by increasing awareness, but without any accompanying campaign to donate to such research as would be needed to make our work in this area more effective, is that a lot more people are aware of what we already do and are presented with the social requirement to enter into it out of habit. Which isn't that helpful at all. Indeed, I think it may be quite harmful on balance. I'd say we could use much less awareness of mammograms and for many women breast cancer screening in general (possibly cancer screening of any kind for many is a waste of time and money).

The false positive rate is way too high to be a useful test for many women which we use it on. There are specific cases where it may be quite useful, but the general public isn't going to know that when they, as people have quite vigorously in the past when discussing the flaws of this processing during debates surrounding the ACA, will insist on receiving such treatment in spite of its general futility. The general practice of screening some millions of women in this way annually seems to be saving perhaps one life in a thousand and subjecting several dozen, perhaps as many as a hundred other women per thousand to the kinds of worrying and stress over medical matters that isn't provided by checking WebMD every time you have a medical problem and nearly as many women as those who die of breast cancer without treatment are subjected to unnecessary (and expensive, both in money and well-being) forms of treatment for no apparent reason what so ever. That seems like a tremendous waste of a general awareness campaign to expend vast amounts of human energy and effort upon. A more focused campaign rather than general call saying something like "hey what about breast cancer!" would be much more constructive.

As I said with the ALS ice bucket campaign, this is a serious problem. Some thousands of women will be afflicted by breast cancer every year. Some thousands will die of it. We should have some level of seriousness in our social response to this, even if there is some humor injected into it. It should also be less about demonstrations of awareness, which unlike ALS, I think we're quite well aware of this as a problem as a society, and more about direct demonstrations of concern and aid to the problem as it exists now.

Corollary to controversy

There's a flipside of course to how atheists, secularists, scientists and science educators should proceed on the question of how to teach evolution to a population of creationists.

How creationists should interact when confronted or how they carry and present themselves is equally important to a civil discourse than how others push back against them.

As a hint. Having your beliefs criticized or questioned is not censorship or oppression. 

Don't react as though you are being silenced when a ton of people come into a social media forum and say "eh, no, that's wrong/stupid". That may or may not be an appropriate way to try to reach someone who is factually wrong about what the facts actually are, but it also isn't the same thing as being oppressed for your beliefs. You stood up and said something. Other people disagreed with it and decided to stand up and say something back. Criticism is how we (Americans at least) avoid the need for censorship, by making our ideas fight in the open for supremacy and social dominion rather than pressing them into the darker corners and demanding they stay hidden away. Some of our ideas are bad or inconsistent with available evidence, and those ideas will find many people ready to push back upon them. Each of us tends to have some of these wrongful beliefs and ideas in what we think of as carefully crafted assumptions core to our being and gets defensive when they are pushed back upon.

That doesn't mean that being pushed back upon is the same thing as being censored.

The entire reason this topic of evolution came up again in my radar is a famous former baseball pitcher (Curt Schilling) and now baseball analyst decided, unwisely, to use his twitter feed to try to debate evolutionary theory, as I guess one does when one doesn't think very much about what they will say on social media forums and expects that it will be a good forum for changing people's minds. Toward the end of this digression, he decided to make a parting shot that supposedly if say, Muslims, had brought it up, they wouldn't be attacked for it because we're all liberals who just hate Christians. This proceeds from a false assumption that somehow these other religions are okay or correct on these issues because they're not Christianity. Atheists, who are mostly liberal in their politics, actually spend a lot of time running down Islam, Judeo-Christianity, and even Buddhism, on creationist beliefs and other issues. There just aren't very many non-Christians in America that the attacks aren't very pressing and aren't seen very often by the majority dominant Christian seeking to claim persecution for his beliefs. There aren't very many Muslims running around in the US trying to say that god created the Earth in 7 days, or that the Earth is only 10000 years old or some other such absurdity, not because there aren't Muslims who believe such things, but because there aren't very many American Muslims. There are very many Christians doing so, in part because there are very many American Christians. So it is they who get pushed back upon. That has nothing to do with whether the underlying beliefs are more sheltered or presented because these other people hold religions that supposedly aren't as annoying to secularists. They do. Sometimes more so. But on that topic, they don't. Because there aren't many people to talk to and ask around these parts.

What was more amazing in raising this statement was that Schilling was not censored by anyone for attempting to bring up something that many people think is wrong (even if many people agree with him on some levels). In fact he wasn't even censured by his employer. He was still busily posting vaguely racist right wing interpretations of the impending problems in Ferguson, Missouri concerning a criminal justice matter over the weekend. But guess who was censured? His co-worker, Keith Law, who began posting counter-tweets and arguments to Schilling and others as the argument swirled around for the evening and into the next day. ESPN has claimed this was not the basis for a suspension from twitter but did not offer any counter-narrative explanation that there can be another interpretation that one can follow as plausible. Law posts fairly often about all manner of topics, as one does when one is actively using social media and was silent about the basis for the suspension himself when posting on other forums. What that leaves is an atmosphere where ESPN appears to have punished someone because they defended scientific theories publicly and not punished someone who expressed religious beliefs that apparently demand they doubt those theories publicly, but who also expressed the position that he was being punished for expressing those beliefs. When his opponent was the only one who was.

Something is deeply wrong with that impression that we have a society that concludes, very commonly, that its dominant population group by religious affiliation is somehow living in a systematically oppressed world. And quite simply: "you people" need to shut the fuck up about oppression on that point. Being told you are wrong about something is disagreement. It is unpleasant, yes. The fact that someone can disagree with you, and others may rush to defend that person, is not the same as being in a position of persecution and oppressiveness. People sometimes should disagree or attempt to in a more civil manner (this of course, goes both ways), or learn to try to have constructive debates where their core and essential beliefs and priors are more easily examined by casual and interested observers. But that we disagree, and that we sometimes disagree vehemently over positions as diametrically opposed as basic worldviews, is a consequence of living in a pluralistic and liberal democratic state of the sort that the basic rights of the US Constitution grant to the individuals to practice and the state to protect. It is not at all the same as living in a society that say, demands state fealty to a religion, or a lack of one, and punishes with criminal and civil penalties even including the death of those who refuse to comply. Nor is the same to claim this is the variety of persecution when one is told that because they work in a public position (a teacher for example) they cannot use that position to advance their religious beliefs upon others. They are still welcome to do this privately. They just can't do it in their official capacity. And quite simply it is absurd to claim that someone is being held accountable and persecuted for their beliefs if they aren't punished but someone who defends a position which appears contrary to those beliefs is punished. Atheists are much more likely to encounter public discrimination and censure than any Christian sect. They're much more likely to be fired or dismissed, or not hired or held up for a promotion on that basis. There are nearly zero elected officials with an open expression of atheism in the country at any level of government. And so on. I do not know Mr Law's religious views or lack thereof, and won't presume to speak for them, but he expressed a pro-science view, with the same level of politeness and openness to inquiry (if not more so) than his interlocutors. He was the one punished. So yeah. Shut the fuck up about being stepped on and persecuted. I see shades of this in the Gamergate and shirtgate backlashes, where threats are issued toward people for expressing an opinion, and it is this group issuing threats toward other people proclaiming that it is the oppressed. Both groups claim oppression, but if one side issues direct threats of physical violence as a means of depressing the turnout of their opposition, I'm inclined to say that's the side committing the oppression. I didn't see any threats issued here. But I did see discipline hammers fall down on people. They were not the people Mr Schilling assumes are likely to be punished (eg, himself).

There are reasonable presentations of religious persecution or oppression of religious belief. I am for instance more sympathetic to an argument that using the legal system to require privately owned businesses to provide certain wedding or marriage related services (usually for homosexual couples) seems a stretch. That does not mean that I wouldn't consider that behavior a form of bigotry or at least discrimination or that I would not consider encouraging boycotting such businesses to use social coercion rather than legal sanctions to overcome the practice or drive that any business practice like this out of the industry. But I'm not certain that the government needs to step in in these ways if we have an environment that is increasingly open and welcoming to homosexual couples for marriage and equal protection of the rights granted by marriage contract laws and that there may be competitors who will be happy to serve such couples and take their business. It is in this general realm of social coercion that I think people should be pushing back against wrongful or harmful beliefs perpetuated by some religious people, such as creationism or anti-homosexual views. People should criticize. They should argue. They should debate, persuade, cajole, annoy, organize, and persist. If this atmosphere of debate reaches a point where people do not feel they can air these views publicly, for fear of the social ostracization and consequences of holding and airing unpopular views, that still is not oppression. That may or may not reflect an unpleasant atmosphere for productive and constructive debate, where the best defenses of these now unpopular ideas are not being made or sought out. But it also may reflect that those ideas are held in social disdain for very good reasons. And that people who want to hold to them should have to confront those very good reasons and try to resolve whether or why they want to continue holding these unpopular views. Maybe they will come up with better arguments in response. Chances are they will not (Mr Schilling presented nothing that hasn't been a standard creationist or ID argument for decades for his part). In the case of religion, even it evolves in what it accepts and proclaims to its followers and interested observers, one could readily find and hear arguments made either for or against slavery from the perspective of religion. One rarely sees a direct claim that slavery is morally acceptable today. Similarly various religions or their derivations have adopted ways to incorporate scientific discoveries and interpretations like the orbits of planets, the big bang theory, and evolution without much conflict and violence done to the scientific consensus on these issues.

As a final point to all of this. One of the most annoying processes of public debate and discourse is the shifting goalpost method of argument. As an example. People demand evidence for X. Other people subsequently present evidence for X. Evidence of X now becomes a non-important factor to be dismissed (even though it was just requested), or the source of evidence comes under dispute. Almost no one is reacting by saying "huh, I didn't know that, I will now investigate what you have presented to me". Schilling did this several times (transitional fossils, "problems" with the fossil record, etc) before tossing off people attempting to present him this evidence as people attempting to persecute Christians.

Evolutionary theory is one of the arenas of social discourse for which there is abundant evidence because the biological field of scientific inquiry includes hard empirical sciences with lots of data points from which to draw reliable conclusions (genetics for example). On other matters, say, economic theories regarding minimum wage law, there is much less hard empirical data and a lot of speculative conclusions. Sometimes none of those may be shown as correct in a predictable and testable way. For these subjects, arguments regarding sources of data can be more valid concerns over ideological bias. One would expect that political matters could often inspire difficult and nonconstructive debates as a result as people retreat to the corners of expertise for which their priors hold to their stated outcomes and beliefs. For public concerns over science, this is less useful. Scientists can be individually biased, and many fields, particularly in difficult to research matters like social sciences or medicine can have complicated problems with the manner of research and verification or replication of results. Skepticism can be a useful tool in digging through results that do not smell right to us for that very reason. Lots of pharmaceutical studies are flawed because they are produced or paid for by the companies attempting to market a new drug, for example, and the results were cherry picked to make the drug look more effective or to have a broad array of possible benefits, and so on. Skepticism of that variety is very useful. But that skepticism neither requires us to go in the direction that creationists insist nor does it automatically mean that data is false because it conflicts with their priors. Even if they were able to disprove evolutionary theory or some other cosmological theory, this creationist explanation does not stand on its own merits as a central truth that should replace it, if one is being openly skeptical and examining the merits of each idea. Even standing within metaphysics and dismissing empirical observations altogether, what of some other religious faith's interpretation of the story of creation? Why is this one the one? It isn't, there isn't anyway to demonstrate that. It just is the one that you want it to be because it affirms many other things you would also like to believe about yourself, your identity, and the world and how you interact with it.

This may all be a fascinating argument in an introductory level course on comparative religions or something amusing to contemplate as one studies Greek mythology as a child, but it isn't a constructive way to talk about science and debate its merits. I would agree it doesn't seem very constructive to try to bludgeon Christians over the head with data, as that's been going on for decades. Or that there are institutional problems with the way science is being conducted, or that there aren't very many conservatives in some fields of study which may offer distinct perspectives, such as in moral psychology, and so on. But if Christian creationists aren't willing to observe what scientific study and the field is doing or what it has produced as evidence in support of its conclusions then why even bother having the argument? One possible interpretation for this is to not bother to engage or dignify this position with debate. If "they" want to go believe that, whatever. Our concern would be this large body of people who aren't sure what to believe. And maybe look at why that is and what we can offer. People tend to demand rigid uncertainties. Science doesn't tend to offer rigid uncertainties. But it can offer quite a lot in the way of taking some uncertainties and finding ways to make them predictable, testable, and empirical, taking the misunderstood or unknown and making it understood and known as best we are able.

Having a flashlight in a dark room doesn't always illuminate the whole room. But it makes it a lot easier to see than fumbling around in the dark.

How to teach to "controversy"?

"Hill found that 58 percent of respondents said this topic is only "somewhat, not very, or not at all important" to them. People who held creationist views were the most emphatic about their beliefs; 64 percent of that group said they care about being "right," presumably in the metaphysical sense of rightness. " 

I tend not to worry very much about whether generally the population accepts evolutionary theory on its own, excepting as it is a harbinger for otherwise poor quality scientific backgrounds. It does not have very much to do with almost anyone's daily lives. Antibiotic resistance and viral mutations would be the average person's limit of visible experience for which they are having adverse effects (by not getting vaccines for their children and by overusing antibiotics for viral infections for which they have no impact or farmers using them prolifically on animals we consume). These are fields for which the limited education of the average person on germ theory and the types and causes of illness, or even just the ability to critically examine ailments and their causes in others (eg, people get colds not because it is cold, but because they stay inside more often with other people when it is cold), is probably a bigger concern than evolutionary theory. Meanwhile the average person is not likely to work in a biochemistry lab or a genetic engineering research firm or as a naturalist studying animals and animal behavior or biodiversity. The specific influence upon their lives is pretty small as a result and so it is not something I worry a great deal about in particular.

What is concerning on this subject is that my "opposites", the creationists, seem to care an awful lot about it, much more than the much smaller cohort of people who are, like me, atheistic and accepting of evolutionary theory. And then this was also a concern: "An estimated 28 percent teach evolutionary biology according to the recommendations of the National Research Council; the rest don't advocate either view" Science teachers apparently don't care very much about whether the general population learns about science either. It's one thing if I don't care, because I have no children and little interest in teaching such creatures. But if the teachers at large don't care (or are afraid to, a plausible explanation in many cases), that's a deeper concern. If there's a large percentage of people who care a great deal, but who disagree with established scientific concerns, there needs to be a way to raise it for everyone else, the people who are unsure or don't care very much one way or the other or who otherwise want their children to learn the proper scientific ways of thinking and analysis as part of their upbringing and education.

Some thoughts

1) Let the most adamant creationist people go and teach what they want through home schooling (they're often already doing this).

2) Let the most adamant creationists set up their own private institutions to send their own children, with the possible result, if this is a significant problem that people do not learn adequate science in primary education, that they could risk being shut out of certain professional fields as adults (unless they address this later on by attending colleges that aren't conservative Christian in nature).

This is also already happening. I often think it may be acceptable to let them use tax credits to fund the institutions simply because #3 below looks so bad as a long-term prospect to me. We've had decades since Scopes and the needles haven't moved very much in the general population, and I think there's not very good reasons to think this will change in the near term for sure. My general thinking for #1 and #2 is that creationists aren't very easy to argue with logically, so they're better off not impacting everyone else as much or not being as concerned about everyone else because they've segregated their children off. I think it likely that if they are left alone to do their thing, there's a possible gain in them generally leaving everyone else's kids alone and we can focus on educating those children instead.

As a hopeful note, I don't know that this self-segregated education style has a lasting effect that the creationist might hope for. It's very possible that their children may not care as much about their religious identity as they do (often for other unrelated reasons) and this may allow for openings of doubt in any factual basis behind creationist mythology.

3) Continue the curriculum and courtroom fights and leaving teachers and school administrations to fight it out with parents who don't pursue those two above options out of inertia or marginal interest. I'm not very enthusiastic about this as a result because school boards are often democratically selected. As we should see from the link, not only are there a ton of creationists in America; roughly four times as many as the atheistic population which is largely on its own fighting back as the theistic evolutionist is not very concerned about the issue one way or the other, for reasons that should be obvious. They're also much more motivated about the issue. Meaning they will go vote for school boards that advance creationist views as much as they can get away with and they will win those elections in most states, with adverse effects upon the overall quality of education available to everyone. Not just what is available to creationists and not just impacting upon science curriculum and evolution in particular.

The optimistic view is that religious dogma on other issues, such as birth control or homosexuality, is driving away many young people from organised religion as young people have broken from their elders and parents on these questions, and they may also break on this question once broken away on others. This suggests that in 20-30 years time, fewer people may care a great deal about this as a question of evolutionary theory in education. I'm not sure this is a good calculated risk given what creationists or millennial revisionists can do to science and history education in the meantime. That damage is still considerable.

4) A different approach would be to let students try to bash each other's heads in by debating or bringing up these issues. I don't think this is an effective method of teaching "controversial" issues until perhaps high school and my preference would be that it be in the form of a comparative religion or philosophy course. Creationism is not science and doesn't belong in a biology class.

5) Address the question of meaning. Teleology has a long use as part of religious doctrine for providing people easy answers (if I think badly misleading ones) about the nature of the universe and one's purpose in it. As the poll should also show, there's a large cohort of people who are theistic but accept evolutionary theory or place their deity as having a specific involvement. To explain this view (or one possible interpretation of that view). Let's say god created evolution as a biological process, and upon its long and winding paths, came a result of the creation of man. This purported god was pleased by that development and endowed human beings with some special significance (often the "soul"). Or something to that effect. That's an opening for which acceptance of scientific conclusions about the nature of existence has walked through Christian theology for centuries ("god did it, and this is how", or other similar interpretations). Evolution for whatever reason is not typically pushed in the door this way and in fact is presented precisely as the vehicle for atheism that many anti-science creationists fear it to be. That may have to change tactics.

I don't think that's going to provide a very satisfying answer for meaning and purpose at all to address the question of "meaning" for which many people reject evolutionary theory to present it in the "god did it this way" variety of explanation. But apparently a lot of people do. I see this example of "meaning" frequently used in movies with an alternative to gods in the form of super-advanced aliens seeding humanity into the genetic code of the planet and sometimes teaching humans basic skills of agriculture or warfare, or in some cases various "advanced" technologies (a position which makes even less sense than the soul concept advanced by Catholics given that there's actually very strong observable evidence against it, while the soul is a metaphysical concept devoid of evidence or empirical debate). This path provides some presentation of meaning that is to me just as hollow and useless as those provided by religious scripture and organised religions. But given the popularity of the plot points, it is not surprising that the problem of meaning dominates the need to cling to creationist myths, whether science fiction-based or religious, to avoid the difficulty of addressing personal or species level meaning. I sympathize that those are difficult questions for which simple and emotionally driven responses may provide comfort and ease (but not actually answering the question). I don't think the average person wants to contemplate these issues very deeply, or at least very often, in favor of actually living their lives.

Which is probably why many people are fairly blah about whether evolution is a thing.

To put a quick flip on this science fiction-y thinking. There's also been a strain in Star Trek type shows that the future will be better tomorrow because there won't be religions because presumably the aliens we would encounter won't have them either or will find our myths absurd and have their own better ones or some such. While I find the humanist ethos running through Star Trek amusing and sometimes appealing (and sometimes not so much, since it glosses over economics on the basis of "we have matter replicators"), there doesn't seem to me to be a basis point for saying that human beings on discovering other sentient beings from other worlds would suddenly and inevitably accept that this means that there is no god and their religious beliefs are pointless. What it might (optimistically) suggest to many people is that evolutionary theory is generally correct. But that acceptance of theoretical knowledge already doesn't come into conflict with the questions of purpose and meaning that most people are using religious beliefs and practices, and the affirmation of congregations of like-minded others, to try to wrestle with. Those questions aren't going to be diminished by the discovery of and communication with other beings.

The appeal of thinking apocalyptically

There seems to be no limitation to the ability of humans to conceive of ways that their own generation will be the last generation of humans to exist and flourish. I can conceive myself of a myriad of destructive forces that could signal the end of modern civilization. I am not certain that most of them pose us a grave risk in our lifetimes. This does not mean that investment in multi generational solutions is not worthwhile; it simply means that our imagination of time is far too limited. Studies of history would rather quickly show us that many things we take easily for granted are very recent, and that (positive or negative) social changes can happen more rapidly than we anticipate. Studies of other cultures would rather quickly show us some people still don't know of their benefits at all and live at a much more marginal subsistence level. We ourselves often as not have already developed such specialised economies surrounding these benefits that most of us could not replicate them outside of that society of specialisation as we lack any of the required training or aptitude.

Of these world ending scenarios I can think of perhaps four that are worthy of our concern.

1) Asteroids or other large deep space objects colliding with the Earth (or the Moon if they were big enough). - There's a lot of stuff out there and the Earth is a fairly large gravitational influence to pull in objects that pass very close to us. The easiest way to start on this project is to set out to assure we can detect random space particles of asteroids or comets that may pass nearby. And then from there figure out what we would need to do to repel, divert, or even destroy those that pose a greater threat of damaging our environment or potentially impacting near a population center.

2) Nuclear warfare, particularly on a large scale. - There's still enough nuclear firepower in even some of the tertiary nuclear armed countries to annihilate most of human civilisation in minutes. This is to say nothing of the American or Russian arsenals that could (still) do so several times over. The easy way here is to reduce the size of those arsenals overall. That is unlikely for political reasons beyond a certain point. One good incentive of doing so though is the materials used to detonate a large city can also be repurposed to power a large city relatively cleanly, with at least much less of a footprint environmentally than a coal power plant. More countries will occasionally consider this an acceptable possibility.

3) Biological pandemic. - I do not think we're about to have a zombie plague breakout at all, but it is very possible for a virus to wipe out large numbers of people and create a social panic far exceeding the absurd levels of panic we generated over a few religious fanatics and their rejection of modern society via terrorism. We have various methods of response already available to research and cure or treat some diseases. Probably the biggest problem is actually identifying when something is a serious risk of becoming an international pandemic capable of killing or incapacitating tens or even hundreds of millions of people. Even something that could kill a million people a year is a serious problem (and there are diseases that do so right now, but they generally don't have a transmission vector that poses a serious risk to developed societies like the US, so nobody really gives a shit). The tricky bit there is then to do so before it ever reaches that point. And then actually being able to show the counterfactual of mass chaos and biological devastation was true instead of a false alarm.

I think this is somewhat less likely than is historically the case to be a serious concern. Humans live in somewhat more removed circumstances from livestock/poultry (not everywhere), which were the pathogenic sources for killer diseases like smallpox in our past. We also live in a more connected society which means that most of us have been exposed to more varied diseases and developed a broader immune spectrum. Smallpox was still potentially lethal to Europeans but vastly more so to aboriginal peoples in North and South America precisely because these peoples had had no exposure to it and no time to develop it (and in not a few cases, because the Europeans accelerated the plague by spreading it deliberately). Something generally ignored is that the introduction of small pox to the western hemisphere is estimated to have killed off millions of people in less than a century and certainly tens of thousands were dead within a few short years. This is far, far more destructive than AIDS, or Ebola, or even the famous influenza outbreak during the WW1 era as a matter of perspective. Whole villages or towns were wiped out or ceased to function. In order to repeat this, we would most likely require a viral or bacterial agent that acts lethally, spreads easily, and for which humans have no current immunities (meaning it would be unlike other infectious agents). That can happen. Viruses and bacterium can mutate and adapt, and our overuse of antibiotics as a society is not helping by potentially forcing such mutations forward faster than we can adapt our medical knowledge.

4) Global warming. - Of the four of these, this is probably the only one that actually requires amendment of human behavior in any way. It's also probable that unless it generates very catastrophic results (possible), that mostly richer countries could adapt to climate changes and circumstances without a major impact on well-being and lifestyle for most of their citizens even as climate is shifting. The problem isn't the billion or 3 people living in the rich or near rich world. It's the other 3-4 billion who are living in societies that are closer to subsistence levels or abject poverty. Their lives can be ended, their countries destroyed or chaotic, and so on. I regard that as a very serious matter that people of Bangladesh would be impacted and it does not seem sensible that we should do nothing as a society or individually in response. But that leads to the actual and more sensible debate, "so, what do we do about it now?"

I've seen or encountered a lot of arguments and they come from both the local, individual level, and the societal, governmental level.

• Stop burning coal. Easier said than done, but I agree. Coal is the most bad option here to power a modern society used in large amounts. To do so you'd have to change the price of burning coal to be less profitable ALL over the globe, not just here, where coal use is actually going down already, or change the price of alternative fuel sources (natural gas for example) to be cheaper options. 
• Use and fund alternative energy projects. I suspect a far stronger argument could be to stop funding "dirty" energy projects or fuel use with substantial subsidies first rather than trying to redress this balance by funding yet more energy projects. 
• Apply some kind of externality (as "net zero" income tax) onto existing fossil fuel consumption and sale. For the most part if we could pass a pretty clean bill to do this, and the tax wasn't used to build new infrastructure (unless it is upgrading existing infrastructure or a distribution system for new or cleaner fuels), this would be my favored approach at the policy level. I have little confidence such a bill would be clean and that there would be all manner of carve outs. The basis for this working would be that most people could avoid the tax by reducing their individual energy footprint, which in turn should make it easier to pay for any consequences of climate shifts as they may be reduced (and thus less tax would need to be raised). 
• Localvore food consumption. For the most part I think this is a silly idea and that it may even be counterproductive environmentally. Maybe not on climate change but on water pollution from agricultural run-off of nitrates or disease vectors from using manure. Which in turn requires feeding and care of large animals, who themselves are a considerable source of pollution. I think this argument rests on several concerns; that trade from elsewhere is somehow inefficient, which is usually false, I see no problem if I have to buy my grapes from California or Chile and I am greatly improved as an individual to have a large array of possible produce and meat to sample and enjoy in my daily meals. We are all also greatly improved to buy things from other people by selling them things that we are ourselves effectively producing rather than trying to consume them all ourselves. Trade works and is almost always a good in improving our lives to let things be grown or produced in places that can do so far more effectively than we can ourselves. The major flaw of that argument is it dramatically underestimates that the environmental impact of modern agriculture is almost entirely at the production stage (especially for meat), and not at the shipment, storage, and distribution stage. Which is pretty small for most things. Even if it is not zero, it is the act of large scale farming (even local farming) that does most of the work. It is generally more efficient and much less damaging to have a large farm, even a local one, going out and fertilizing and producing food and flora and fauna for sale than to have lots of people gardening. The reason people should garden should not be that they believe they can save the planet. The reason should be that it is something they enjoy doing or enjoy the (literal) fruits of. As related concerns, many people have gone into buying things that are "organic" or "natural", with similar environmental justifications that are usually equally flawed. The reason human beings should consume these things in their diet has little to do with the environment and more to do with the fulfillment they receive from production of the food stuffs and the overall reliability of the food chain if they feel they know where something came from rather than an impersonal package of meat or vegetables. If the environmental impact is, as I think it is, actually somewhat negative, it's fairly negligible at the individual level to have a garden versus trying to buy local produce from farms that can be grown half way around the world for a quarter of the environmental cost. 
• At an individual level many people may seek to reduce their energy use, or to use alternative sources of energy themselves. Unfortunately there appears to be a large signaling effect at play rather than an effective result. People and companies sometimes install wind turbines that have to be powered to spin because there is inadequate wind to turn them most of the time, and then wastefully power them anyway. Solar panels are more frequently deployed on the side of the house or business facing the street, regardless of whether that is the side which would generate the most electrical power. Recycling rates are far more likely in the US to be reasonably high if the collection of recyclable goods and materials is public. People who own more fuel efficient cars on average drive them more often which leads to larger traffic snarls and jams, which in turn leads to more pollution and higher energy consumption rates, for not only themselves but for other drivers. Governments respond to this last by building more roads, which paradoxically can increase traffic and energy use further by providing more routes, if not also more destinations. 
• By far the most significant thing at an individual level (here at any rate) that could be done is to do away with the home mortgage interest deductions in the US (actually this is government having to do something, but it would change individual behavior significantly). This would help to encourage urban density instead of suburban life; which nobody seems to actually want so much as they may find the cities unpleasant right now. We would need some governmental actions to reduce rent controls or property constraints such that more people could live vertically, thereby reducing commuting and concentrating our energy demands, densifying populations and destinations to make public transit much more viable, and so on. 
• Tax congestion on roads by instituting variable tolls on controlled access roads (highways). 
• We may want to combine that with an effort to allow for more telecommuting work and flexible scheduling. 
• Another strong individual level constraint would be to have more energy efficient objects, put in insulation, design homes and offices to be heat/cooling efficient, unplug things more often, compost food waste, and so on. Most of this is invisible and inconspicuous consumption. That makes it difficult to signal. Which implies that maybe we need conspicuous signs that we've done it that come along with these projects and maybe more people would investigate these options. 
• Geo-engineering experiments to alter weather or sunlight absorption patterns. These are uncertain, but in my view are at this rate the most likely options to proceed forward and be carried out, somewhere, by someone. 

The individual arguments arise primarily out of frustration that the societal level few things are being done. I find that there are two basic attitudes to really any large scale societal issue.

1) Most people expect someone else to do all the work of fixing it. This may be a consequence of specialisation. Climate modeling or weather and climate analysis and geological histories are complicated subjects and can involve a great deal of the dreaded "math". It is assumed that because this is a "science" problem, that scientists will solve it for us. In repeated polls I think the average American expects that whether we are faced with a plague or widespread drought and heat waves/cold snaps from climate shifts, we would have smart people somewhere stashed working on solving the problem and they would invent something that wouldn't require us, as individuals, to really fundamentally alter how we live in a "negative" way. Innovation must be a part of our problems and their solutions, but innovation sometimes requires that we will eat some vegetables for a while before it gets into the wild as a tamed beast with applications ready to go. It is not as clean and tidy as is believed, and it often involves an iterative process of fits, starts, failures, and restarts. And then even if it is ready to get something off the ground and working, someone could try to squash it politically anyway. 

2) Everyone else then basically expects that somehow nobody will ever do anything about a major problem at a large enough scale and that preparation for imminent disaster and societal collapse is an immediate priority. Or if not taken on that scale, that we should adopt fairly radical and often ineffectual behaviors to moderate our worst and most destructive impulses, without properly and empirically seeking out a way of identifying what those are. In other words, "we should all do what I say, because I don't like X." Whether or not X is actually a problem or not or whether solution Y is itself any more desirable is not important to discuss. The important thing is to be seen as "doing something" about the problem, and often as a corollary to loudly proclaim that whatever that something is, it's probably what you are doing about it.

The advantages of both of these systems is that it allows the measure of blame to be mostly shifted away. And for complex scenarios for which the individual's merit and demerit is very small, elections, pollution, water or antibiotic overuse, etc, it is in fact the case there isn't much incentive to making significant changes in your own behavior.

The question mark is what happens when the cumulative incentives are bad such that little or no change is made, in an area something must be changed or calamities are at risk of occurring. The best bet is to look for a way to change the game and rig the incentives. But if we think we're about to destroy the world and no longer have the incentive of "future generations" toward which we are abstractly connected through children or grandchildren, nobody has any incentive to change the game. They actually have a strong incentive to hold out for a better deal to do what they want. Apocalyptic thinking is the self-important way to examine the situation, the flexibility of the status quo, and determine (or pre-ordain really) that the world probably won't spin on without me and my kind in it anyway, so why should I care what happens to it now.

This is a reality based outgrowth of my disdain for the common belief in supernatural afterlives. The world is here, now. We have some responsibility to do things with the people in it, and to interact and attempt, if often poorly, to share their concerns and affections. The thinking that the world won't be here tomorrow, or that there's some better world out there instead, destroys these moral obligations to one another in the face of potential catastrophes. It may accelerate their comings and goings rather than give us breaks and stops on that path. 

Mental health

And what amounts to our paranoia in response. I found this interview filtering through to my social media feed. And I found the answers given so utterly depressing that I felt I should eviscerate them more deliberately so as to feel better.

What signs should parents look for that differentiate a child who needs help coping from one who presents a danger to others?
"As a general rule, young adults who develop erratic behavior do so in response to either substance abuse or early symptoms of psychosis (schizophrenia or bipolar disorder). The most important thing to look for is a marked change in behavior: previously outgoing with lots of friends, now spends most of his/her time in bedroom alone; or a dramatic drop in school grades." 

Note this doesn't answer the question. This simply re-identifies the sort of people who need help coping socially, but does not identify the supposed danger signs to others. Likely reasons for this are as follows: 
a) there are no easy ways to differentiate who is a supposed danger to others. Even psychosis related mental ailments are not automatically dangerous to other people. 
b) parents certainly aren't going to detect them if someone is going to, but they will likely worry and overblow what signs and symptoms they do detect. 
c) psychiatrists get a built-in business model of seeing every teenager who is marginally sullen because of this. Which is basically every teenager. 
d) substance abuse is a bigger problem than any mental illness in relationship to violence and injury, and in fact can considerably amplify most of the problems that mental patients would otherwise have in dealing with any potentially violent episodes. Alcohol in particular. That subject matter was dropped in favor of others but at least got a nod to its existence.

Do therapists receive adequate training to recognize potentially dangerous patients?

"“Therapist” usually indicates a psychologist or social worker, although it may also include people with other degrees, including those obtained by mail order. The training of therapists, and their ability to evaluate an individual such as Elliot Rodger, thus varies widely depending on their training. California seems to have more than its share of mail order degree therapists." 

This read like : lots of people who are supposedly helpful mental health individuals are giving bad advice, so you should only see people who are "qualified". That may in fact be quite true given the status of our mental health system and its affiliated tendrils (prisons, therapists, etc). But it does not answer what kind of training is available that could recognize potentially dangerous patients. This is likely because there does not appear to be any such training available. Or at least what is available is not worth that much more than what is easily accessible information (eg, this person just shot or attacked multiple people, and the psychiatrist will be able to tell us how that happened, but not why it doesn't happen more often). 

The value of psychiatry is probably not in deducing these factors ahead of time correctly but in guessing more often than is true to be cautious and in particular, in having regular treatment and sessions for people with serious issues. Ideally its value is in helping such people to lead as normal of lives as is possible or otherwise cope with these problems successfully. 

This response tells us that our shooter probably had inadequate mental health care from what he apparently received, but that could be easily deduced by the paranoid and misogynist ramblings he posted. 

What strategies do people use to cover mental illness when confronted by parents, social workers, teachers, and law enforcement? Are there questions authorities should ask to identify a person attempting to conceal mental illness?
"Many individuals who are psychiatrically disturbed are able to “hang it together” for a few minutes when confronted by a police officer, judge, etc. I have had very psychotic patients appear quite rational for 10 minutes in a courtroom by focusing their mind. Patients with Parkinson’s disease can similarly suppress their tremor briefly by focusing their mind on it. Thus, it is unrealistic to expect a police officer to make a clinical evaluation, and such evaluations should include a mental health professional.

In Vancouver, at one time, they routinely had a psychiatric nurse go with the police officer to do such evaluations. A psychiatric nurse would be less threatening, could take [the suspect] aside and ask open-ended questions. (For example: “What is the worst thing that has happened to you in the last month?” or “If you did decide to kill yourself, how would you do it?”) The nurse could also, with his permission, use a cellphone to call his mother (or whoever raised the alarm), and/or his therapist at that time to get more information. Mental health professionals are more likely to pick up subtle clues that something is not right. To expect law enforcement officers to do this is unfair to them; they are not trained to do so and this is not why they became a law enforcement officer." 

I find this response absolutely fails on multiple levels to address the question:

1) law enforcement officers are very often dealing with people with serious mental disorders (including substance abuse problems in particular). These are people who may generate many complaints from the public, who may be homeless, who may be victims of crimes often (much more often than they are aggressive) or witnesses to them, and so on. They are common members of the community and probably more common members in the world that police will inevitably travel as a matter of course. 

2) law enforcement officers should therefore have sufficient training to deal with people suffering from some of the more common disorders and problems to be able to deal with these issues. This is not the same as discerning which people are likely to be violent-prone for a mass shooting for preventive treatment, but it is absolutely ridiculous to state that this is unfair to law enforcement, or that no expectations should be placed upon law enforcement in effect because "we haven't trained them". One expectation should be that they become trained. 

3) some law enforcement personnel should have additional training available and taken for dealing with specialized cases, or should have access to psychiatric assistance if they have such calls where they suspect that's the issue for an appropriate investigation and for the civil rights of the person involved to be protected. 

4) most law enforcement does not do this and their typical response to mental disorders is or has often become violent (in more than a few cases, it has been fatal). All of this is a serious reason why many people DO NOT or WOULD NOT or even SHOULD NOT go to the police when they suspect a problem of this variety. And thus becomes a further reason why a few people would slip through the cracks as they are unlikely to receive any attention and treatment to a potential problem. 

5) None of what was described as a method of response to the problem suggested to me that police, with an appropriate unit tasked to it, couldn't do some of this work already. They just don't have any training usually to do so. Asking open-ended questions and not appearing to be a police officer are not overly complicated methods of investigation. These are also not likely to provide cues that should tell us precisely what the issue is, only that more investigation is needed. That's likely something good police work could do already. 

Under what circumstances can a family member, social worker, or law enforcement officer have a person involuntarily committed because they represent a danger to society? With the recent spate of shootings perpetuated by people with known mental illness, do those laws need updating?

"Commitment laws vary by state. Details about the law in each state can be found on the website of the Treatment Advocacy Center. A rating of state commitment laws was published in February 2014. California’s commitment law is among the strictest, thus making it very difficult to involuntarily commit an individual like Elliot Rodger for evaluation. State laws need to be improved."

- In what way? What precisely as information was available that police lacked to act upon it (social media footprint/web search?) This question demanded a followup of what kinds of improvements are needed or being implied. 

I'm very, very skeptical that broader involuntarily commitment laws are a good approach and I find that effectively, that's already what we are doing. We're just waiting until people are suspected of committing criminal acts first to do it. 

My main skepticism to this approach is that a) police could use this as an over-broad way to "arrest" people, something I would want very strong controls over. Lawsuits that punished the officer and psychiatrist involved who signed off on it for example if they detained someone without a serious problem, and not lawsuits that punished the police department or the hospital. The persons involved should be held directly responsible for any civil rights violations they perpetrated in these instances so as to encourage them to be as careful as possible with this power. We do this only in limited basis right now for most civil rights violations (improper arrests or misconduct, read: lying) by police and prosecutors now. It should be expanded. b) I am very skeptical that psychiatry as a field is liable to identify with precision only those people who are dangerous and separate them from those who are not. Our information where it concerns the brain and psychology in general is sometimes sketchy and unreliable, our mental health professional skills are highly uneven, and I would stress that our approach appears to be an overabundance of caution where these matters are concerned which would lead to far too many people being detained in this way as would be appropriate to allow for, and c) that our current involuntarily treatment methods do not appear to be very successful or productive for many disorders. Many that could otherwise work rely heavily on the cooperation or independence of people who are otherwise irrational. Here there might be room for expanded scope in legal terms and especially better community approaches for mental health involving doctors, family, etc. I do not think this is what was being suggested versus having more involuntary commitments given the leading question that was used (this may have been the fault of the journalist involved more than the psychiatrist). 

Have we allocated the proper resources to help identify, treat, and potentially confine people whose mental illness makes them dangerous? If not, where do resources need to be directed? Are there enough facilities to treat these people?

"The answer is a resounding no. In California, like most states, we have closed 95 percent of public psychiatric beds. Even if a decision had been made to involuntarily commit Mr. Rodger for an evaluation, it would have been extremely difficult to find a bed. The public mental illness treatment system is completely broken. Rep. Tim Murphy in Congress has held hearings on the broken mental illness treatment system for the past year and produced a good bill which could improve it: The Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act. Every member of Congress should be supporting it."

- I would agree we have terribly allocated resources to the treatment and care of mental health. I would agree that often relatives or trusted and concerned friends may be important allies in the proper treatment of problems. I'm not sure I would necessarily support everything in that bill. But it's probably the only good answer given here. I do not think we have a population of dangerously mental ill people that exceeds 40k (in as far as they may be dangerous to other people), unless we include virtually all violent criminal actors and all substance abuse problems. I do think we could use more than 40k in-patient treatment facilities or especially much better out patient treatment as is suggested. 

Note also the bill he agrees with provides substantial funding for the training of police for mental health problems and suggests there are significant problems with these interactions as they now stand. Suggesting that this is in fact something that police should be expected to deal with on some level. If not being the appropriate legal adjudicators of the liberty of all sane and insane people alike, then they should at least know what the variety of insanity could be and be able to react accordingly. 

Some general rules of things that occur frequently to me

A general series of philosophical observations following weird dust-ups on social media.

1) Humanist/secularist notions while they can often operate on a utilitarian ethic do not absolve us of the prospect of entertaining ourselves before discharging some grand moral duty. Life is itself a (quasi) measurable reward that includes pleasures of more selfish nature. Indeed, I'd suggest that ignoring our selfish nature leads us away too often from moral duties. What our selfish nature does do, taken to its logical conclusion, is recognize that other people have needs and wants and concerns and that if we want to satisfy our wants and needs and have our problems resolved, we must also seek to satisfy some of theirs. Call it friendship if you want. Or it can be more transactional and more obviously set in a reciprocal altruism sense. Or it can be Adam Smith's invisible hand, guiding us to act in the service of the community by recognizing and meeting its needs through operation of business. There are numerous interpretations of this as a social order.

2) Humanist/secularist notions are not distinct from feminist notions. What they (both) often identify is that the particular target of some abusive or oppressive behavior/policy/action is, even in a modern developed country, very often a woman, and that this therefore means that an oppressive agent must not be tolerated or must be stopped on these grounds. Not because it's a woman but because there is oppression. The oppression and abuse exists because it can oppress or abuse a woman more easily than it might have a man. That's not "feminist" to point out; that's realism. The "feminism" part is deciding that the solution is to empower women and to remove the anchoring weights of abuses or oppressive agents of society that all people might flourish.

3) This does not mean that other kinds of oppression or abuses of power and authority do not exist and would be tolerated or ignored. Racism or religious intolerance, say, does not exclude or compete with oppression of women. It competes to some degree with the amount of outrage energy available. But if oppression is a vehicle of political activism, and responding to it is likewise, then there's not a top limit on the amount of capacity to respond to it or to impose it. The limitation is the apathy of the oppressed or those who work on their behalf with the implication that it cannot be changed.

4) There are various reasons that particular kinds of changes may not work or be as successful, and I think we should assess a particular kind of change on these grounds to wonder whether or not it will actually and usefully advance the cause it claims to advance, and not whether or not the intentions behind the proposal say so. Just because there is a problem in any society does not imply that a) the government should do something about it, that b) whatever X we are suggesting we do about is the only and best solution, or that it is in fact a solution at all, or couldn't make it worse. It's very probable we overlook very effective solutions in the haste to satisfy our demand for good intentions. Example, the focus on "equal pay" for women overlooks that a very large portion of the supposed discrimination is not from greedy employers trying to scam a female portion of the work force into working for less money than men, something that basic discrimination legislation would assess and could help deal with, but from a systematic issue with how women have come to interact with the workforce while still often juggling a home life based on traditional norms and our modernizing economy has failed to recognize this and offer ways to juggle successfully. The discrimination is still there, but it is much smaller and more manageable. The bulk of it is still probably discriminatory but the fault is more our own (as a society) so we're trying to pass the buck to make someone else pretend to do something about it.

5) Feminism, like other unpopular labels, has an image problem that causes some people to recoil from the label. Some of this image problem is the fault of more radical feminist notions (see: environmentalists setting fire to vitamin A enriched rice because "it's a GMO!" or atheists with a deliberate intention to stir the shit rather than advance secular ideas). But most of this image problem is a public relations issue caused by media and entertainment coverage and the public's mental framework working as stereotyping.

6) Labels or the rejection of same should not excuse people from practicing ideals and values consistent with those labels overall goals that they otherwise would agree with, say, religious (or non-religious) freedom, or the relative economic and social equality of women and girls. The "no true Scotsman" fallacy applies in both directions. If these are your ideals, fight for them in politics and society, practice them in life as best you are able, and argue over them to examine them from time to time to assure that you are practicing them as best you are able or that they are the best ideals you can put in practice available, and don't worry very much about what other people try to call them as a package of ideas. You can decide that. Atheism can become both the flying spaghetti monster and scientists and scientific literature using neurological behavior, evolutionary predictions and behaviors, anthropology and so on to explain the phenomenon of religious belief. Environmentalism can be both Greenpeace and getting a Prius and pushing for wind or solar power adoption (but probably not getting solar panels on your house since most of us would put them on the wrong side of the house). Feminism can be both the cause for more gender-balanced societies and the associated expansion of opportunity for women, or even for families and children regardless of gender issues, and so on (say, better family leave, paternity and maternity, or more flexible work schedules and telecommuting opportunities to allow whoever to stay at home when possible.)

7) Feminism doesn't remove or exclude the prospect that men and women can or should get along, that they couldn't approach one another, can't flirt, can't have (casual) sex, can't enjoy off-colour remarks and the like in mixed company, or couldn't discuss sexuality at all, and that somehow the only relationships between men and women must be completely sterile and platonic friendships mixed with somehow, someone becoming (mutually) attractive as a physical partner once in a while on top of that. I have no idea why this argument persists (naturally among men) that the issue is somehow that approaching and talking to an attractive woman is in some dystopian future liable to get a sexual harassment lawsuit. Depends on how that talk went, or what behaviors went along with it. There's nothing inherently wrong with recognizing attraction or even making people uncomfortable with potentially offensive remarks. There's something wrong with not recognizing that they are making others uncomfortable, using them out of context, or persisting in that attraction when it is not desired to be pursued or acknowledged.

And in particular, in not acknowledging a variety of wholly legitimate reasons why that lack of interest could be true that are not "I have a boyfriend/husband/significant other". Such as "you might be an asshole, go away". Possibly learning how to listen and talk to women, or just talk in general with other human beings, would be a great improvement for much of humanity. I do not consider myself a master at this, but other people seem capable of listening and responding to me in what we might fashion to call a conversation.

8) Most people do not give a shit. About you, or much of anything, often including themselves. What that means is not "they will run over you in a truck to get their way", or our sometimes more likely interpretation "they will run over you with the truck in order to make their way". What that means is mostly they will ignore you as you would ignore a bug on the sidewalk and they're not actually a problem. They are not plotting your destruction, injury, and harm. The general status quo of other people is apathy and ignorance toward the general status quo of other people. They are not interested enough to come and bother you, deliberately inconvenience you, find you absurd and worth their shame and derision, and so on. This implies both that we should be less wary of other people and that we should pay attention when they are paying attention to us or doing something that we feel is worthy of our attention.

cosmos

So. As much as I like NdGT. I'd have to say I was sort of underwhelmed by Cosmos. I found two high points 

1) The story at the end about Carl (tying the series to the old). Most of humans teaching about and exploring the world around us owes a great deal to people before us mentoring and motivating. And not to people hectoring and lecturing. And one of the points he mentions is not merely that Sagan was a scientist of some note, but that he made a favorable impression on Neil as a human being as someone to aspire to be like not merely as a professional calling but in qualities of decency. We're not quite like robots.  

2) The pale blue dot and the capacity to pound away at the immensity of geological and universe-level time scales and the immense vastness of space. The moon as a single pixel scroll from a week ago does this too. 

Space is... really big, and usually not much to see. 

Time is also not that full of humans. The insignificance of man in the face of these features shouldn't be discounted, and does much to free us from worry over all but our most personal and immediate concerns (food, shelter, safety and well-being of loved ones, etc). Chances are, whatever it is, it just isn't going to matter very much in 50 years (rarely do humans and our squabbles matter this long) or 5000 years (much rarer) or 5 million years (we haven't even been around that long, so who knows). 

We're just not used to thinking of time in those terms. 

Most underwhelming: Bruno. I guess that was included in part to try not to piss off as many religious fundamentalists? I'm not sure if it worked or not. But the biggest problem was that Bruno was mostly operating from an unfounded conjecture and had found little or no evidence to cling to his convictions with, and there didn't appear to be a very strong tie to Galileo or Copernicus' actual discoveries and scientific explorations being made so much as a morality play about the evils of censorship and closed-minded attitudes in positions of authority (which there are rarely any other kind). 

These are both important points for the operation of discovery and inquiry. But they're not always scientific modes of discovery or inquiry after those requisites of relative freedom academically and curiosity are met for the paths of our exploration. People have explored lots of useless bullshit in their free inquiry and while dominant theories have been overturned and later ignored, not just things like the earth-centric universe, many theories go no where or turned out to be useless conjectures. We don't talk about most of it now, mostly because we have some new versions of it. I suspect string theory would fall in this category under the rubric of science that goes no where, possibly much of social psychology and medical reviews under flawed science that should go somewhere, and I know most creationist babbling would fall into it under the rubric of free formed inquiries rather than rigorous investigation. 

I've seen Neil talk before (live and on frequent guest slots on Daily Show/Colbert, and podcast appearance), so I know he knows how to communicate science and concepts of science and philosophy. But overall it was merely decent as a starting point. Between this and Bill Nye's indirect funding of Ken Ham's nonsense, this hasn't been a great month for science. But it hasn't been a bad one either. 

Note: I watched the True Detective finale first the other night and only got to Cosmos tonight (Monday). I was okay with that too but it was somewhat meh at parts. 

I did really like that they didn't get them all, just the one guy, that there wasn't some weird plot twist from left field, that they both almost died, and the last line (it used to be all dark, I think light is winning). I wasn't as fond of the Marty's family plot line back story sort of pbth'ing out. 

I'm not sure why some commenters weren't happy about the sheriff not being a lead/being obviously involved either. Lots of promising police work goes nowhere. It would make sense to include some of it at the expense of an authoritarian prick like that sheriff clearly was, being brought lower. 

Identity, privacy, disclosure.

There seems to have been two internet explosions surrounding disclosure related stories on identity over the last couple weeks. I have some thoughts.

First. I used to write this blog, such as it is, under a pseudonym. I don't know why exactly. My employers haven't cared what my politics are to check up on me, and my (anti/non) religious and political views are fairly well known to anyone who knows me already. I would often share the blogging bits and pieces via feeding it into my facebook page. The blog retains the title, I still often use the nom de puome as a nom de guerre in online games, but I shed the anonymity around the time G+ went live I believe. To some extent, this has meant some other people occasionally glanced at some words I produced. It has not really altered my life in any measurable way that I can see. Maybe this voicing of opinions reduces future employment options, or maybe it doesn't. I haven't looked at it that closely as a consideration given my sometimes radical politics and my certainly unpopular atheism that it could be harmful. But as noted, those were pretty well known to most anyone who talks to me for more than one or two conversations on religion or politics.

And that's most anyone who has talked more than once or twice with me since I'm fine with hammering away at those things people aren't supposed to talk about.

But I recognize I have a fair amount of freedom to say things willy-nilly and suffer the consequences when people start talking about what I have to say (sometimes inaccurately). I have long since come to a certain arrangement when arguing points of contention with some people that I attempt not to be personal about it (sometimes they are not so forgiving of course), and while some people this is still evolving or a new arrangement of sorts, it works reasonably well for the average conversation to remain mostly civil. Occasionally I find it necessary to block people on social media for using argument styles that are designed solely to provoke by diving straight onto insulting ad hominem or bravado style "I'm right, and I have such and such credentials, so I don't have to answer your question" attitudes. These are frustratingly common, but I curiously find it easier to manage on the "Internets" than the "real lifes". Real life doesn't have a block button or a ban hammer.

It would, by dint of my tendency to annoy people and that fact I am no longer anonymous, be possible for someone inclined to assemble information and make more threatening gestures in person. This is unlikely though. I usually aggravate people in argument but not to the point where I've encountered death threats or insinuations of physical violence deemed necessary against me. At some point I just get ignored or they go away for some other reason, or they start slinging insults and they go away because I ignore them.

I am not however a woman, complete with all the thoughts about women and men that supposedly entails, much less working in a field and a profession typically dominated by men. And I am not transgendered. 

I have somewhat less to say on the Dr Isis flap than the Dr V one, at least right now. But I'll get to it in a couple pages...

To put it plainly, atheism is a pretty raw deal in America for the level of disgust and hatred available for it from the average person encountered and their casual understanding and dismissal of the worldviews of atheists anywhere. But at the end of the day, it's also one of those identities that you can shovel up into a closet and nobody notices unless you want them to. Unless I were to look Arabic, which I do not, at least not without dressing very differently to follow American stereotypes of Arabs, nobody is going to follow me around to see where I go to church/mosque/temple. Or even if I go anywhere at all. People might ask and I could easily lie to get by if I thought it necessary, or I could say, as I often do, I'm an atheist and don't go anywhere because I don't see a need. Most people don't ask.

It is not a pleasant class of society to be in. It is not a privileged class in the sense that it isn't Christianity, or even some other people of the book, so to speak. It's not the same to be a WASP to be a "WASA" (much less some other combination of race and atheism). But it's very easy for most WASPs to assume you are one and not ever have to, if one doesn't want to, correct that impression. It can be much easier to dial it back publicly if one moves or changes careers and thinks it might be an obstacle. Or even when one thinks it might be an obstacle in promoting causes such as secularism, or science, or skepticism; causes that aren't necessarily tied to one's religious disinterest and which deserve may deserve strong support and public airing on their own rights.

It is not the same variety of bias and prejudice even as the dark side of the force remains strong in it.

Elsewhere on the intolerance scale. It's a little bit easier for others to discover that someone is homosexual, there's usually a second party to give it away. Bigotry against homosexuals has diminished greatly over the last few decades and is somewhat lessened than that of atheism as a politely acceptable intolerance to express. But it still has plenty of cultural enclaves where it retains an extra degree of viciousness. It is not unusual for a family to fracture over, for people to be beaten or assaulted. It was not that long ago that police forces would use any excuse they could for beatings of this type as official practice, not merely as an unofficial extra kick of injustice. We still do not have team sports with an openly gay athlete playing professionally somewhere. There are open atheists playing. This is reversed with members of elected legislatures, there aren't any open atheists serving in offices at the national level. There are uncloseted homosexuals and have been for some time. But nevertheless, the prospect of being an out of the closet homosexual is not a fun and smooth life relatively free of bigotry or invective or familial distress, or even physical danger. Many people would prefer this aspect of their lives remain private or hidden as a portion of their identity in the same way that an atheist might conceal this feature.

To run through the problems further. Race or ethnicity has typically a visual cue that "this person is different", and that cannot be readily concealed by most, and we still have plenty of social animus associated with this. Gender is usually pretty obvious as well at the glance and we've got lots of cultural and social cues if it wasn't for some reason. And transgendering has a history to it that if somebody wanted to dig into it, they could find out about. Pretty easily it seems. It would from there be simple enough to cast it in a depiction that is less than favorable to the questions of identity involved and not even out of some individual bias or discomfort. That's still the social customs that must evolve as they must still evolve on other implicit racism or misogynistic problems. We should not leap into these unknowns or less-well-knowns with the level of discomfort that we often have.

I have to admit I have not thought as much about transgender issues as homosexuality. I am not made deeply uncomfortable or unsympathetic by either issue. This just isn't on my radar as something I've known about from someone else or talked about that someone has. I've known other atheists most of my life and am one myself. I've known women my entire life and as an adult have formed some of my closest relationships with women, not all of them with the side purpose of exchanging sexual pleasures. I suspect this provides some insights there as well in either case if one is willing to pay attention and listen. I've known people from other countries, people of other racial backgrounds, people in mixed racial relationships, and so on. Many of these cases would be long-time friends or family members to me, and I have witnessed both wonderful things about them and the sometimes awful things about how other people are treating them on the basis of this singular characteristic. I've known people who are homosexual, as well as people who have experimented with their sexuality and sexual orientation or desired to do so, and so on. These are things firmly on my radar as life experiences that I can quickly relate to. These aren't that complex for me to understand even if I am sometimes a little dense at first. They are not my experiences, so I will miss things and have biases. But I will listen and learn.

But. I'm not entirely sure how one writes about transgender as a subject even. I have read some on the subject to know that this is "a thing", that this is certainly a serious problem for how our society treats such people, and interacts with the topic broadly. I have seen the abuse that people, children and adults, take and it seems among our very worst examples of humanity. The Chelsea Manning case alone strikes some rather deep chords that the military was deeply unsympathetic to the idea of a transgendered soldier, and was possibly more brutal in its treatment while in captivity awaiting trial still identified as Bradley Manning as a result. There are dozens more stories and experiences I am familiar with with the piles of abuse from parents and other school children. It's not something I've had direct experience though. Reading about the problems involved is still an abstraction versus a friend who wanted or felt compelled to change gender. I can only go so far with my understanding that way.

I'd like to think I would think deeply, sympathetically, and carefully, if I were writing about someone else's experiences. But I'm a human being subject to biases and (some) respect to social conformity and conventions. I can easily see how a story about a golf inventor that suddenly got more complicated as the inventor misreprsented basic features of their inventive-related skills and credentials would look funny and demand deeper investigation. It is not uncommon for people to assume identities for business purposes that don't actually line up with reality (people lie on resumes, have fake degrees, etc) and for journalists to find that worth reporting on and people worth knowing about. Somewhere along the line, it would be trivial as a matter of investigation to discover that that inventor had changed gender identity. The question then becomes, "what good is that information to the story?"

I'm not sure how that makes it a deeper story myself. What exactly does that mean? How did it impact the invention, the business, the relationship with investors. Or did it have nothing to do with those things, or at worst very little. Perhaps this is something that journalists are trained on that I have missed out on, to sensationalize a story by finding the lurid details that can sex it up and attract attention. Or perhaps there are journalistic ethics and standards that govern such behavior and discourage it in favor of other questions. In any case, these details came out in a story, after the inventor's prior identity was disclosed to an investor, and after the inventor commits suicide. And that was a terrible faux pas and was badly handled. But. I do not blame the writer necessarily for the story as reported (there are other ethical questions beyond the reporting and writing). I don't really blame ESPN for publishing it. I don't know how to cover that story either. I'm not sure if the novelty of the situation would have overpowered other more sensible questions. Again, I'd like to think I'd be less distracted by trivialities and still capable of cutting into the bullshit. Or maybe just recognize there isn't any bullshit worth reporting and move on. I do think I'd be more curious than confused and unless I'm given more evidence of destructive and malicious motives, I'd like to ascribe that curiosity to the reporter as it would likely be something I myself would experience. Transgender just isn't a topic that people bring up very often in the public sphere, that we know who this is in our society, and might ask why with an earnest interest in the answer versus an accusatory angle.

Some people don't want or need our curiosity though. And they've got a lifetime of experience showing them why not to let it in. It would be understandable that this would be an intensely private feature for someone, just as someone's homosexuality could be or their atheism. These are not challenging questions of identity that I find it all that important to "out" people who don't want to be, especially if this fact is not of significance to their occupation, or their intentions in relationships business, public, and private. This is a salacious detail and an inconvenience to our story telling at that point rather than a necessary component of the narrative.

What I do think is that we have a society that views this all as somehow very "weird", not normal, strange, and ultimately worthy of fear or hatred or scorn in heaps and buckets, as it does with any other prejudice set. No matter how enlightened people are or think they are, in an environment where a particular group of people are viewed suspiciously, it's not difficult for some biases to creep in. African descended males who are unknown to us personally are feared by pretty much everybody, including other African males, more than other adults and teenagers. Why? I'm not really sure (there are lots of possible explanations, most of which are bullshit reasons when closely examined) except that that's what everybody seems to believe subconsciously so that's what everybody behaves like consciously on some level. I think when people approach the question of how to deal with transgender issues, they don't really pause and reflect on this but that it seems "sneaky" to them intuitively for some reason. Maybe men are uncomfortable with the idea. Maybe women are too. I don't find this convincing but we do have some severe stick-up-ass thinking on sex and sexuality in this country, so it's possible. If when reporting on someone who seemed otherwise sketchy, maybe that seemed important at the time.

Which brings me to the actual moral crime and ethical conundrum here: the outing to an investor during the reporting process. I'm not sure what possible basis that served. Reporting on it, post suicide, maybe not the most tasteful project, but I'm not sure it has a huge moral sin to it either that it needs to become infamous. If anything, it raised the level of discussion to the attention of people like me where it could easily have remained an abstract topic. Outing somebody's private identity and self while they are alive, and without their permission and without really establishing some clear basis for doing so, with the insinuation that it is part and parcel of some broader deceptive trends put forward by this person? This certainly seems quite malicious. I'm not sure that it was. I think it is more likely that it didn't even occur to anyone to ask that it could be. In one sense, that's a progress too. The debate is to be had about the revelations of identity, people decide publicly this is not a good idea, and the debate moves onto other things.

Which brings me back around to the Isis-Gee fight.

The advantage of concealing one's identity or our most private features of that identity is that it prevents personal reprisals and attacks while talking about controversial subjects, ideally those impacting many people. Some of our finest political and moral philosophers wrote treatises under these false and constructed names for consumption by the public to prevent political and legal consequences against their persons and families. Various whistleblowers or informants to criminal actions have attempted to adopt this as protection against retribution by employers and associates. The action of taking on a concealed identity is not without its nobility for being able to tackle challenging subjects, such as gender biases and prejudices within a particular field or industry.

The problem with having a pseudonym, or a projection online of one's persona, and a popular platform to air and voice opinions and musings is that people invariably demand some level of "accountability". They want to validate the agreement or disunion they experience with these writings and musings with a clear face and persona on which to argue. But this often ignores why people have taken on these concealments in the first place, to raise the level of discussion to a particular issue rather than to the person advancing it. Some have, not always implausibly, argued this also makes it easier to make or advance personal attacks upon others, and many have used this cloak to stab away at their rivals and detractors. This does have an effect of reducing the quality of the debate, for which the anonymity was useful.

Nevertheless, we are talking about a rather serious or endemic issue, where many people are at best blind to the possibility of such a bias, or more dangerously, openly hostile to the concept and conversations surrounding such biases. Scientists are not without their personalities and eccentricities, but collectively, if those personalities are pushing out other voices, even unintentionally through a culture of repression rather than skepticism, that's a problem. Not merely for society. For science.

A large portion of why the Dr V story blew up on Grantland and ESPN is that they lacked the voice of someone to ask a very simple question: "Why does this actually matter? We know it's strange and perhaps confusing to you personally, but is it actually material to the reporting we are doing?" Putting women into science and other male-dominated fields isn't important because women are awesomer than men or some such, it's important because more marginalised people are more likely to encounter particular strands of thought via our culture and cultural biases and this can lead for people, in this case women, to ask certain prodding questions when approaching a subject for study. Not addressing those questions can be poisonous to our process of discovery as it might overlook important variables. Not having access at all to the existence of those questions is even worse because we'd probably never bother addressing them in the first place. So it's kind of important. The legend of Aristotle's flatly asserted notion that men had more teeth than women should be instructive here to the quality of our investigations and inquiries into the nature of the world, and in particular the nature of our societies and institutions.

So why does that matter in the context of Isis-Gee? Because the whole point of Gee's disclosure of identity was to try to marginalize someone making this argument. This was done mostly because Gee seems to have found Isis' online persona, if not her personal persona, to be irritating or hostile. Certainly we might be entitled to take some umbrage at the methods or means other people might use to raise the profile of an issue. Even people who agree with the cause of that issue might find certain approaches less comfortable and wish it were done otherwise. It is a fairly common misperception given to atheists, feminists, environmentalists, and so on that they are composed groups of ideas encompassing very radical notions practiced by and espoused by only very radical and thereby very annoying persons, who are by dint of this character defect, worthy of dismissing the entire project of ideas. This despite that many, many people might agree with some or all of those ideas. So presentation matters and people can point out the problems with presentation.

Taking that umbrage to a personal level however, with the idea that we will use it to attack the other person rather than the issues they are trying to address, seems rather antithetical to good science and healthy debate in a society. It is not necessary even to respond if someone makes personal attacks and what we might deem slanderous remarks without the presentation of being openly identified, by attacking them, or demanding and belittling their identity, and so forth. These are not effective methods of improving our own standing and do not make the issues raised go away. We could instead politely return the conversation to its essential features rather than our personal appearance or insinuations of our personal biases and prejudices and if someone else wants to persist in making the conversation about ourselves, we can ignore that person until such time as they wish to have a calm and reasoned argument. This does not mean that all such criticisms are invalid and should be ignored. But constructive approaches should be favored.

Grantland/ESPN seems to have come away from some deservedly withering criticism more knowledgeable. Their error is at least framed as one of ignorance more than maliciousness, and I am inclined, for the most part, to agree that this is a large part of the story. If reasonably thoughtful people like me have not thought much about a particular subject, I do not automatically expect others to have done so or to have much personal experience reflecting on the issues involved and so on. This is hopefully constructive and means that we should expect to see reporting and writing about transgender issues (at least as they relate to sports) in a more positive and participatory way moving forward. That's a laudable result even if it was embarrassing and perhaps unethical in the procession to that progression. We should at least expect that ESPN's coverage would not include intentional outings of identity in the future without the assistance and participation of the person being outed (ala the Jason Collins story last year).

By contrast, Gee seems to have responded by taking to a twitter flame war, eventually burning his account to the ground and fleeing the scene with the promise of vengeance upon his enemies. Or at least that's the way it is being cast. This is likely not a constructive advance for the debate of these issues of gender inequality and advancement in the sciences. The reason for the difference of result is likely that the personalities involved are still alive to defend themselves, and that the personalities involved became a forefront of the debate. That was only possible because one of those personalities made it a point to disclose the existence, the real life existence, of the identity of his interlocutor.

We should learn from this series of events that identity is a powerful, if not overwhelming, force in any topic. While it undoubtedly matters a great deal on some subjects as a worthy side course to our discussions and digressions, it isn't likely to be materially important in many and will often as not distract us from more important questions that could be of far greater benefit to others observing our discourses than our personal feuds and animus.