Modern fables

After reading about Elan Gale's hoax, Andrew Sullivan has a bit of a rant about Buzzfeed. Now I like a good rant, and the idea that even web journalists ought to check stuff before they publish it is an excellent one. But this is probably not the story to base it on.

The thing is, everything that's interesting about the story is independent of whether it's true or not. Unless you are a friend of Diane (which no-one is because she doesn't exist), it's entirely about what Elan Gale thinks is an appropriately witty takedown of an insufferably entitled fellow passenger.

I read it (linked by my local newspaper) because I do love a good smackdown, and arrogant twits annoy me. By the time I was halfway through I was thinking that this Elan person was a bit of a jerk, and wondering what horrible things Diane was going to have done that would retrospectively justify all this (after all, it had "gone viral", so there must be something to it... right?). By the end, I had concluded that he was indeed a jerk, and I would probably prefer to have Diane on my flight than him.

But the point of what he had to say is not that he did and said those things; it's that he was proud of them. He thought they were witty and justified. Anyone who is going to do something or think something because of reading them will do it whether or not they're presented as fiction; they'll act or think because they've seen something persuasive in the description. Or in one of the billion or so comments it generated in favor or against.

Personally, I wish I hadn't read it. But not because it's not true; just because it was boring and unpleasant and taught me nothing. Perhaps as a hoax it might teach a few people to take twitter feeds with a pinch of salt; but I would be much happier if the lesson people took from it was about how much worse you look to other people when you're trying to be mean. Even when your target deserves it in some way.

Darwinian religion

A recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reminded me of a conversation I had with a creationist a while back. He was touting the virtues of the golden rule over "survival of the fittest". At the time I only commented that the golden rule would be a considerable improvement on a lot of religion, but it made me think of how such things are viewed in the Bible.

There is a thread through the Old Testament of reward and punishment through your descendants. It happens with Adam, with Ham, with Abraham, and with David; it is clearly displayed in the ten commandments:

"I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments."

It is a very Darwinian attitude; your success is measured by the number and condition of your descendants. And it is very clearly displayed in the book of Job.

Job is one story that cannot be other than allegory, if the OT God is to retain any decency. As parable it says that bad things happen to good people; that this is not punishment or abandonment from God; that you should keep the faith and not treat as wicked those who fall on hard times. As a literal story, it shows Jehovah as vain and proud, and willing to sacrifice people's lives and happiness to show off on a bet.

But either way you read it, what happens with Job's children illustrates the Darwinian attitude clearly. Job is described as a good man: "...and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil." All of Job's children are killed in the story, but at the end God gives him "twice as much as he had before". A good man might well have loved his children, and wanted them back; and God has that power, but that's not what happens. Instead:

 "So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Keren-happuch. And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren. After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, even four generations. "

He gets ten new children, and the girls are the fairest in the land, and get inheritances... so presumably they will marry well. And Job lives to see lots of descendants, as any good Darwinian would want.

It is no surprise that the OT would see things this way. It takes a long time and a lot of social development to change such an attitude. It is an evolutionarily advantageous attitude, the sort of thing that you would expect to be hard-wired, if anything so long-term could be.

But it's pretty funny to hear Creationists decrying it as terrible Darwinian invention, when they came up with it first.

Make your customers happy

Recently I saw a piece by Bobbi Smith entitled "Why I pirate". A fascinating read, and worth your time to look at if you have an interest in this question.

Roughly speaking, I half agree with him (her?). Half of it is essentially talking about using piracy to negotiate lower prices:

"I have a lot of things competing for my entertainment dollars.... You have to show me what you've got." 

and

"Get a handle on your pricing for digital media."

It may be that media producers are charging too much for their product. That's their right. My right is to ignore them and buy from someone else, not to unilaterally pay less. It may be that many of his suggestions will actually result in more revenue for them, but that's their decision.

The other half is about using piracy to get around restrictions on the product:

"Don't try and restrict when or how I can purchase your content.... Either your product is for sale or it's not." 

and

"Stop trying to dictate how I can consume your content."

Media producers can stop people selling unauthorised copies of their stuff, but that's the only right they have (and here I am ignoring the side-effects of disgraces such as the DMCA - I mean "right" in the moral sense). If they've sold me a copy, I can sell it to someone else; or I can rig up a system so I can watch it on my etch-a-sketch. My choice.

It sums up for me the conflicted attitude I have to Big Media: they're entitled to protection from piracy, but they have done their best over the years to make me root for the pirates.

Media companies spent years trying to stop people getting hold of unrestricted digital copies of their work. Digital copies of music were going to kill the industry, just like tapes and LPs and VCRs and pianolas.

But I know what would have happened without mp3 players, because I am old enough to remember life without them. I listen to music while I work; at University, that meant hours spent doing assignments and studying with a good sound system playing my favourite stuff. When I started working, I discovered that I can't be bothered lugging my CD collection back and forth or fiddling with tapes that wear out all the time. So I mostly stopped listening to music.

When it became possible to carry around enough music that I could listen to whatever I wanted, I started listening again. And I started buying music again.

This is not pirated music, either. Originally it was ripped from CDs I bought, even though the labels tried to stop it; these days a lot of it is bought from music sites or direct from the musicians. But the RIAA has done its level best to stop me doing it. And the reason I'm able to do it anyway is because of people like Bobbi.

So while I disagree with a big part of what Bobbi has to say, if I have to choose a side I'm going to choose the one that lets me listen to music. The music industry needs to make sure they are on that side, and not the side trying to stop me.

I am happy to pay for the music I like, especially if most of the money goes to the musicians. The industry needs to concentrate on making it easy to find legitimate sources, easy to pay for it, and easy to play once found. Often this will come at a cost of allowing some piracy - but as Bobbi points out it inseparably allows word of mouth advertising.

Stopping such leakage comes at a cost of making it harder to enjoy music, and also of making people angry. Who has not cursed those unskippable anti-piracy warnings on DVDs? And how much good do they do, when they immediately make pirating the movie an advantage?

It's a tough problem for the music industry to solve, but there's a lot of money there as an incentive.

Left and Right

I thought I understood left and right. The right made the machine of commerce work better; the left kept people from falling into the turbines.

The left would get in and build social programs, paid for with taxes on those who made money, and regulate business. They would be thrown out when half the country was employed writing reports for the other half to read, the last business owners had quit or left, and it was impossible to do anything without filling in your own weight in forms.

The right would get in and cut taxes, remove pointless committees, and slash paperwork. They would be thrown out when people were starving in the streets, children were working in the mines, and industrial accidents had their own section in the paper.

The system worked because each side would start with the most sensible measures, and undo the other side's worst excesses, so the good lasted much longer than the bad.

Somewhere the Republican party has wandered off script. In the 1980's they seem to have worked out that everything went better for them if they cut taxes but didn't bother cutting spending. That project culminated in the Bush years of foreign wars, tax cuts, and entitlement spending, leaving a huge debt at the end of a period of prosperity when a real right-wing party would have left a surplus. Now they seem to have decided that it doesn't matter which changes you make or oppose, as long as you shout loudly enough about how excessive the other side is.

And so we have the vision of the Republican party shutting down the government to try to repeal a health care system that originally came from their side. Real right-wingers would explain its flaws, position themselves as the best people to manage it, and fix it when they got back in power. These people have nothing to contribute but scorched earth.

The standard check on such excesses is to throw them out. I don't really understand why the Republican party gets anywhere near 50% of the vote; in any other country the Democrats would be the right wingers and the Republicans would be the extremists that cost them votes.

If they do succeed in shooting the US in the collective foot with a debt ceiling standoff, perhaps that will be the circuit breaker that wakes them up. I am not confident. I have seen nothing so far that suggests they have any idea what they're playing with, or any capacity to step away from the brink. I've been waiting for that circuit breaker for years now.

Interesting times, indeed.

Game Theory In Diplomacy

The deal over Syrian chemical weapons provides a conundrum for people like me: it's a very good solution, since it does not involve bombing anyone and it reduces the chances of chemical weapons being used. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine it coming about without a credible thread of airstrikes to back it up. How credible a threat is more difficult to determine, since getting a vote through congress was looking particularly dicey. But does anyone imagine that if it had been Iceland complaining about Syrian chemical weapons, that something would have been done?

Obama now gets a double benefit from this, as he has a chance to convey a message to the Iranians with his actions. Back in 2003, the US demanded Iraq give up its WMDs. Iraq, after much pressure, eventually said they didn't have any left and offered to let inspectors in. The US said "not good enough" and invaded anyway. The lesson for Iran there would have been clear: if they US comes after you, agreeing to their demands won't help, but actual weapons might.

In 2013, the US can undo this lesson by taking yes for an answer from the Syrians. The new lesson for Iran would be that if you give up (or do not develop) the nukes, the US will not attack, even if it really doesn't like you.

I personally have no liking for the current regimes in Syria or Iran, but military force is very unlikely to make things better for anyone, as Iraq has amply demonstrated.

Therein lies an extension of the conundrum; Iraq was a disaster for the US, and a country like Iran might feel that the US couldn't invade them after that. But it also demonstrated that the US really is capable of barrelling ahead with something like that, even against its own interests. So while attacking Iran seems like a really stupid strategic move, the Iranians can't bank on that being enough to stop it.

So what effect did Iraq have on the US ability to influence Syria? It's hard to tell. An apparent willingness to pull crazy stunts can be very useful in a negotiation like this, even if the crazy stunts themselves hurt you.

I'd still like to see some of this enthusiasm being directed at feeding the refugees created by the civil war, but at least we are not dropping high explosive on it. And even if the Syrians are lying through their teeth about getting rid of their chemical weapons, the deal still makes it much harder for them to be used; for one thing, it would embarrass the Russians.

So far, this has turned out much better than I feared...

Norms and Precedents

I am very pleased to see Obama taking his Syrian adventure before congress. It's a tiny step in the right direction, but it's better than nothing, and there's a chance that it will result in a 'No' vote. Plus, there is the entertainment of watching Republican heads explode as they try to figure out who they hate the most - Bashar Al Assad, or Barack Hussein Obama.

Joking aside, it is important to maintain the principle that the US goes to war by the will of the people. It's one thing for the president to take action in an emergency, but there is clearly time here to get a vote. Even George Bush did that. And make no mistake, this is a war. If Syria attacked US installations, no-one would be in any doubt that it was a war.

An international norm that chemical weapons are beyond the pale would be a good thing. So would a norm that killing civilians - with any weapon - is beyond the pale. But another important international norm is that countries do not just attack each other. The more disputes are settled peacefully, the better are everyone's chances of not being collateral damage. If Obama can start a war on his say-so, that's bad; if he has to get approval from the US people, that's not as bad (but still bad); if he has to convince the world at large, that's better; and if he has to convince the rest of the world to help settle the dispute, that's better still.

Sure, Russia and China can block action in the security council. They have much less power in the General Assembly, but even then the world is not just organised into blocs any more. A more convincing case will get more votes. And as I've argued before, the precedents are important. China is rising; what kind of world do we want to have when they are the ones who can just attack small countries with near impunity?

It's far from clear to me that the latest few hundred deaths in this conflict are so much more terrible than the previous tens of thousands, terrible enough to set another precedent for international violence. And that's why I'm hoping that congress blocks this. The story goes that this is exactly what Obama wants to happen; I don't believe that. Such a result could have been engineered much more smoothly by a 12-dimensional chess player.

If we want to express disapproval of Assad's actions - and make no mistake, they are terrible actions and have been for years - let us aid the refugees. Mobilise world opinion, make their government feel isolated. Make their arms suppliers pay a cost in reputation. Let us be part of the solution, or at the very least not part of the problem.

Not resorting to war

I don't really understand why chemical weapons are considered so much worse than other weapons. Yes, it's terrible that the Syrian government apparently killed a few hundred people with them; but they've killed a lot more with artillery, rockets, machine guns, bombs, or just by rounding them up and torturing them to death.

Nuclear and biological weapons are extremely dangerous, and can extend a long way in time and space from where they're used. But chemical weapons (at least these ones) degrade so quickly that we needed to get inspectors on the ground quickly before the evidence became undetectable, never mind dangerous. Land mines and cluster bombs, on the other hand, kill people decades after they're used.

So now that Syria has crossed the "red line", what do we do? And why did the Syrian regime do it anyway? They seemed to be winning thanks to the latest help from their neighbours.

Here is my theory (which is mine). Assad believes that the US will not invade Syria. It is war-weary from Iraq and Afghanistan, there's no strategic interest there, and it would annoy Russia and China. He doesn't even expect a Libyan-style air campaign, and the vote against it in Britain makes that even less likely. So he uses chemical weapons - if there's no response, he's got one more threat in his arsenal to use against the rebels. If the US attacks, he loses a few installations and perhaps some air defences, but he changes the war from Alawites versus Sunnis, into Arabs versus America. Not completely of course, but it gets him more enthusiastic backing from Iran, Russia, China and all the local non-Sunnis; and less enthusiastic opposition from Sunnis.

And this is partly a war of PR. Killing off all of his opponents is a big job that may be beyond him, but convincing them to back the devil they know would mean he didn't have to.

What should we do? Refuse to take the bait, and walk away from the Red Line? Or stick a limb into the blender that is Syria? It's a tough choice, and much more complicated because of US history in the region, particularly with Iraq.

I have another idea. If we're going to spend money and risk planes and pilots dropping things on Syria, why not instead air-drop chemical warfare suits and gas masks into the rebel areas? It makes a very deliberate point, and it only hurts the regime if they were actually planning to use chemical weapons. It sends a message without adding more weapons or violence to an area which has too much of both already. And it's much less likely to result in US pilots killing Arab civilians.

It's not what will happen, though.

A life well lived

When I heard about Sanal Edamarku's challenge to a tantrik - to kill him with magic - I thought it was an extremely brave thing to do. Not because the magic might work, but because the tantrik (or one of his followers) might have found a way to cheat. Even if it was later exposed, you'd still be dead. And if somebody was sufficiently dedicated to it (or making enough money from it), they might be tempted to just have you killed.

The recent assassination of Dr Narendra Dabholkar illustrates this. I had never heard of him before he died; my loss. He too has shown great courage in taking on the forces of superstition and fraud. Like Sanal, I hope his death focuses attention on this issue and pushes India in the right direction.

Everyone - religious or not - should be in favour of eliminating superstition and putting out of business the con-men that it attracts. If you are religious, such things corrupt and cheapen the true faith, bringing it into disrepute. And for everyone, superstition distorts reality and causes people to do the wrong thing, often with terrible consequences. Medical treatment is delayed or foregone; "witches" are burnt; money that should be spent on food and clothing goes to fraudsters.

Dabholkar's death is India's loss, and the world's.

Knowing what to say

Since I had a go at "other ways of knowing" recently, I feel that I should comment on Steven Pinker's essay on Scientism. PZ Myers gave it a huge serve, and linked to an even bigger one.

In my piece I was careful to say "science (or some broadly similar approach)", because I am not remotely silly enough to imagine that only the fields seen as "science" display a concern for evidence. History is an obvious example.

I was also careful to include mathematics, although really I should have gone more broadly and mentioned logic and philosophy.  These are fields that say "if you assume things that look like this, then you can show things that look like that". This allows a tiny amount of empirical investigation (in showing the assumptions hold) to provide a huge amount of knowledge, as anyone who has ever studied physics can tell you.

But there are many fields that are very important to humanity - art, literature, music - which are not ways of knowing. Often they are ways of communicating facts or emotions or wonder or even just a sense of companionship in a lonely universe. Science may make these better by providing tools for creating them, or providing deeper understanding of how the communication works. Science may change what is to be communicated. But it won't replace them, because that's not what it does.

And some of them, by cultivating imagination and creativity, provide grist for the mills of science by allowing people to think in different ways about what they see (or don't see). Or at least grist for the mills of engineering, by suggesting new things that can be built. Here there is a convergence with philosophy, in that a well-written novel might tell us how humans would behave given certain conditions; it might fall far short of the rigor of logic, but still suggest ideas for more careful investigation.

Having said that, science will remain in conflict with things that claim to be ways of knowing, but have no grounding in reality. Here I'm talking about rubbish like homeopathy, tarot cards, psychics, creationists etc - things that could have been real (in some alternate universe), and that claim to be empirically real, but fail to provide evidence even when given the opportunity.

Pinker's sin, it seems to me from reading the criticism, is to assume that science will eventually know everything and can therefore help these other, lesser fields to advance. It's much truer to say that science can sometimes help other fields to achieve their goals, and that they can sometimes help science to achieve its goals.

My claim is that "other ways of knowing" will either become part of science (rarely) or fade into nothing. As the saying goes, the name for alternative medicine that works is "medicine".

Prosecuting the right people

I heard a US government spokesman make the argument a little while ago that you could tell Edward Snowden was a bad guy because of which countries he was looking for asylum with. (I paraphrase; I can't remember who said it, so I can't look it up).

This is a bad argument. In centuries past there would have been many countries that didn't care what the US thought, and quite a few that didn't even know what the US thought. This is no longer true; these days the only countries that will reliably ignore US wishes are those that are, if not hostile, at least not terribly friendly.

It is much more cogent to observe that Snowden knew without having to wait and see that he would be prosecuted as hard as possible. And all that tells you about him is that he's not stupid; it's much more informative about the US. Snowden has revealed that a major government organisation has conducted an illegal and unconstitutional spying program against pretty much the entire country, and lied about it to the Senate.

In a country whose split from the UK was in part because of general search warrants, and which enshrines freedom from unreasonable search and seizure in its constitution, he should be celebrated as a patriot. The people in charge of this program should be the ones contemplating long prison terms. Anyone who knew about it and took an oath to protect and defend the constitution should be sacked or impeached.

The US government should have promised Snowden full immunity and invited him to testify before congress. We would not then have to worry about what the Russians might buy or steal from him in the way of classified intelligence, and we could have the debate we should be having about what level of spying on the population we're willing to tolerate. Snowden knew that wasn't going to happen, and it is a sad commentary on what this country has become.

I was going to rant about how Edward Snowden is not the issue, and we should be investigating the NSA, but SMBC pretty much nailed that.

Knowledge is power; if we let the government know everything about us, we hand ourselves over to the first tyrant who manages to get his or her hands on the levers of that power. I would much rather fight a few unpopular religious zealots with the help of the rest of society, than take on my own government alone. But I've said this before.

How to design a church naturally

Andrew Sullivan is waxing rhapsodic about the Pope's words on gay people. Such Kremlin-watching is of purely academic interest to me - a straight atheist with no gay Catholic friends that I know of. Especially not hopeful priests. And I have to say that Sullivan would do well to wait until he sees substantial change (rather than a mere absence of judgemental language) before getting too enthusiastic.

What it does remind me of is how grateful I am to several centuries' worth of people who worked and sacrificed (for various reasons of their own) to leave me a world in which I am free to ignore what the Pope has to say.

I have no idea what he intends, and I have no evidence that someone chosen for his ability to climb a social hierarchy has any special insight into what is right and wrong. But I don't have to care! Where previous generations would be forbidden to marry those with the wrong opinion of the Pope (with or against), or find themselves shut out of jobs or even killed, I have the luxury of not even knowing what religion most of the people around me are.

Others do not have this luxury. Sanal Edamaruku is persecuted simply for exposing a "miracle" as a hoax. Raif Badawi is sent to prison and lashed for criticising Islamic religious figures, and risked death.

I would encourage Sullivan to quit worrying about what the Pope has to say. Take advantage of his freedom; turn his back on an institution that has no place for the likes of him. The more people do this, the less power these institutions will have over those who won't do their bidding.

It is institutional churches that provide power to the religious nutters to make the lives of others miserable. That same power can also be used to improve the lot of humanity, and the zealots are thus committing a double crime. But if institutions that persecute and divide are abandoned and perish, then by accident or design we will get churches that reject the hateful and the controlling.

I think I have just said that we need to apply evolutionary biology to religious institutions. 100% of your recommended daily intake of irony...

Tell me something I don't know

I am not a Christian, but I can still do theology. When I was young I went to church and learned the Lord's Prayer - Jesus' answer to "how should I pray?" I still have it more or less memorised, and it will no doubt show you some combination of which denomination I went to and how good my memory is after all this time.

"Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen."

If you have ever wondered what the point is of praying to an omniscient, omnipotent being, this will tell you.

Let us begin in the middle, at the only request that is intended to result in anything tangible: "Give us this day our daily bread". This is as minimalist as you could want; no sporting or military victories, no recovery from illness, no real financial gains (certainly not a roll of the dice), no political breakthroughs or academic success. Just enough to get us through this day. A reminder to focus on what's important - the next few requests.

The next is "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us". Not just a request for us, but an implicit bargain. A reminder that we have things to be forgiven for, and that we should in turn be forgiving others.

Then "lead us not into temptation". What does that mean? If it is granted, it means that anything else you might see is not supposed to be a temptation. A reminder, then, not to be too easily tempted. And following on "but deliver us from evil". In Christian theology as in many other religions, this does not mean that you win; it means that you try. If you resist evil and are killed in the process, you end up in heaven, or a better reincarnation, or whatever that religion promises. Two sides of a coin: resist evil rather than joining it.

The rest is all straight recitation of one simple idea: God's in charge. Something he, of all beings, needs no reminding of. Why is it in the prayer, then?

You are praying to an omniscient being.  He already knows what you want and need, better than you do. He already knows what he's going to do about it. Your requests and entreaties are not going to change anything; not because he's hard-hearted (although he might be), but because the needs behind them have been accounted for already. What's the point?

It's a series of reminders. It's for you, it's not for God. It would work if no-one heard it, even if God himself didn't hear it. No wonder Jesus said (Matthew 5:6) not to pray in public - it's like talking to yourself out loud.

People who publicly pray - particularly for some result - are missing the whole point. It's not that they're hypocrites (although there's a solid bloc that are), it's that they're wasting everyone's time, including their own.

But there is some good news. If you're doing it wrong, but with the best of intentions, no doubt God understands that too.

A little peace

Nelson Mandela's daughter Makaziwe has complained about media coverage of her father's condition: "It's truly like vultures waiting when the lion has devoured the buffalo, waiting there for the last of the carcass. That's the image we have as a family."

I have to say I agree wholeheartedly. Nelson Mandela is a fine human being, who can be proud of his life. He devoted a big part of it to the fight against apartheid; having won that, he then followed a path of reconciliation rather than revenge. South Africa is imperfect, but compared to what might have happened it is a shining utopia for which he can claim a great deal of credit.

Sadly, as with all humans, he will eventually die. When he does, it will be appropriate for humanity to remember him, as an example to look up to.

In the meantime, we should be leaving him alone. Good quality medical care is what he needs; no purpose is served in hourly medical bulletins on the news stations. Even before I heard what Makaziwe had said, the constant updates were starting to annoy me. This world has plenty of urgent things to attend to; let us leave him and his family and his doctors in peace.

First, do no harm

I do not think sending weapons to the Syrian rebels is a very good idea.

The current regime is oppressive to its people and dangerous to its neighbours. The fact that it's using artillery on its own cities and getting help from Iran and Hezbollah tells me pretty much everything I need to know about it. Unfortunately, it is perfectly possible to have more than one bad guy, and Syria is a poster child for that.

The opposition there undoubtedly contains a great many people who just want to live in a reasonably free society. Unfortunately it also contains some genuine extremists. As far as I can tell from the news reports, it is attracting more all the time; and the regime is busily creating more of them by shooting their relatives - the same way that the US government did in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Who would predominate if this rather fragile coalition were to win? Who knows? I've not heard anyone suggest a good answer to that, or even suggest that there was a strong likelihood that the question could be answered.

In fact, if either side were to win a military victory, the result is likely to be a bloodbath. If the regime wins, they will get rid of anyone they can find from the rebellion. And if the opposition win, there's likely to be a cleansing of the Alawite minority, or at least significant oppression of them. The Alawites are riding a tiger, and the hardest part of that is the dismount.

Sending arms into a such a situation is like trying to put out a fire with a grenade. If you know exactly what you're doing, it may work. If you don't, you spray burning fuel all over the surroundings. More weapons make the conflict worse; they make it last longer; they leave more casualties and more people with reason to hate or fear the other side.

Nor do the people pushing such an idea fill me with confidence. They seem to be mostly people who haven't learned from the US experience in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Libya (which, along with getting rid of Gaddafi, also sent weapons all through North Africa). Sending weapons will almost certainly encourage others to send weapons; Syria is a Russian ally, and the Iranians will get (further) involved, and so on. The last thing the Syrians need is to become a proxy battleground for other countries.

It may be that Syria is destined for chaos no matter what we do. The old syllogism (Something must be done; this is Something; therefore this must be done) is at least as likely to make things worse as better.

Simply sending weapons is probably the worst option. If we must do something, there are two much better directions to try.

The first is to try to remove weapons rather than adding them. Block shipments of weapons and military supplies to all sides. That's probably an advantage to the regime initially, but the heavier and more sophisticated the weapons systems, the more supplies it needs.

The second is to get fully involved and really separate the two sides. Put in a peacekeeping force, with or without the regime's approval (most likely without). This would be tremendously expensive, but has the advantage of actually stopping the shooting - as long as they can be convinced not to shoot at the peacekeepers.

Of course both of these options require significant international cooperation. Otherwise they will simply turn into a regional war. That would be very hard to do; the various parties have little or no trust or liking for each other, and the religious aspects of the conflict do nothing at all to help. A republican administration would have no chance whatever of doing this right now, and a democrat one would have to put everything into it. I doubt that anyone could justify the effort to the American people; it's too easy to demagogue with Syria and Iran and Russia in the frame.

And this is why doing nothing may be the best option. It's not helpful, but it least it does not make things worse.

If we want to spend vast sums on Something, why not give someone like Turkey the supplies needed to set up decent refugee camps?

Why I am an accommodationist

You will often hear people saying that evolution is not compatible with Christianity, or more generally that science is not compatible with religion. Those who disagree (particularly atheists who disagree) are called accommodationists. I put myself in this camp for two reasons.

The first is simply because I think it's true. Certainly some religions are not compatible with evolution, or science, or reality generally. Here I'm thinking of creationism, Raelianism, Mormonism, Scientology, etc. But that's not true of all of them, and it's easy to describe a religion that is compatible. An actual Jedi knight would be able to claim that, whatever you thought of his or her morality. If the speaking-in-tongues Christian sects were really able to send missionaries to foreign countries and have them miraculously speak the language fluently, that would be powerful evidence that science could not ignore. And of course a religion that simply said "God created the universe and he wants you to treat each other with respect" would have no collisions with science. That a thing is not scientifically provable does not make it incompatible with science; it just puts it outside.

One line of argument that I find particularly unimpressive is "the virgin birth and the resurrection are scientifically impossible". For one thing, that's the whole point of miracles. A well-equipped scientific investigation of a modern equivalent would presumably see a stopped heart, flatlined brain waves, etc. And actually, if we really cared we might be able to organize a virgin birth with modern technology. And for another, all science can really say about such a thing is "there would be no way to explain that" - just as radioactivity violated well-accepted science, as did the precession of Mercury. Science does not investigate and pronounce legitimacy on everything that ever happens; it looks directly at only a tiny fraction of what goes on. For all we know, every day somewhere on this planet a dead ant is resurrected; if that were true it would be a long time before it was even noticed, much less explained.

My second reason is more political - it's a not a reason to be an accommodationist, but a reason to argue for it. Religion is not going away. Science is essential to long term human survival. Evolution is key to understanding the biological world that keeps us alive, and which we are currently conducting a full scale experiment on. If people are asked to choose between religion and science, far too many of them are going to choose religion. We can't get rid of horoscopes and homeopathy, much less religions that people invest their identities in. If the accommodationists can't build somewhere for the religious to live, very bad things are going to happen.

What then, of the New Atheists and those who argue for incompatibility? Should they shut up?

Not at all, for reasons that correspond well to mine. Firstly, this is their sincerely held belief, and I'll not be telling them to keep quiet. Some of them (people like PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins) get the full force of creationists over and over again, and maybe they're right.

And secondly, the politics of it. The New Atheists are moving the Overton window for everyone. I think they have directly contributed to the increase of reported atheists in recent years - not by convincing vast numbers of people, but by making it socially acceptable to be atheists. By arguing that religion is not just untrue, but visibly harmful. That's a valuable thing. In the fight for science, without them it is religious purists versus compromisers, and the purists can claim the high moral ground, with no risk. With them, creationists are taking the risk that if they lose on the science, their "incompatibility" argument turns into a self-inflicted attack on their religion. And the accommodationists can claim the high moral ground of being reasonable and moderate. Also, it's fun to explode creationist heads by telling them that they are agreeing with Richard Dawkins when they say that Christianity and Evolution are incompatible.

I find it hilarious and encouraging to hear the New Atheists described as "militant fundamentalists" by those who don't like them. Hilarious because, well, can you imagine Richard Dawkins as a militant fundamentalist?

• God probably exists and you should think hard about what he has to say.
• Thou shalt not suffer a witch to teach that Wiccan garbage in a science classroom!
• Sternly worded articles against those who insult the prophet!
• We will never stop writing books explaining why you're wrong!

Yeah, sure. But it's also encouraging, because of the implications. By attacking New Atheists as "militant fundamentalists", they're also attacking real militant fundamentalists. They have become an epithet to be used against those "we" dislike. Every time that appears in the popular press, the religious extremists of all stripes get pushed a little bit further from power and influence.

And that, really, is the main game. Religion is neither an unmixed blessing or an unmitigated disaster; and it's not going away soon. As a religion gets smaller it loses side-effects faster than benefits; it is much harder to coordinate a vast coalition of small sects to achieve some harm, than to take over a single big one. Small religions are easier to leave, easier to ignore. It is harder for them to control or threaten governments. The people who join them are more likely to be looking to achieve simple human good than to control their fellows.

But small religions find it particularly hard to stop us from doing the right thing; they can band together much more easily against something that's actually wrong. If we can simply avoid the harm of religion, then it will no longer be important whether they stay or go, and it will be up to individuals.

What have you got to hide?

It's one of the standard lines of argument for more surveillance - what have you got to hide? Well, I have a great deal to hide, and perfectly good reasons to hide it.

This argument implicitly assumes that none of the people in law enforcement who would be running this surveillance are corrupt. To which I say, as long as we're going to play pretend, why not pretend there are no criminals? Then we wouldn't need surveillance.

So let's imagine that there are, in fact, bad people with access to the system. Attracted there by that very power; corrupted in place; or falsely believing themselves to be working for the greater good. What can they reveal that I'd rather have hidden?

• I'm currently organizing a major protest against a new development by Megacorp. It'll be disastrous for my suburb, but it'll make a heap of money for the owners. I don't want them knowing where or when the next protest will be.
• I've been leaking evidence to the press of corruption in the local bureaucracy. I don't want anyone seeing me meet the journalist involved.
• I've been phoning in anonymous tips about drug dealers in the area, and getting them busted. And also I think I spotted where their lab is. I don't want anyone to know it was me.
• My child is a local celebrity, and the gossip mags are always trying to get pictures or rumors or dirt.
• My business has come up with a way to cut the cost of our product in half. We're developing it at top speed, and we don't want anyone getting in first.
• I'm going on holiday next week, and I don't want anyone taking the opportunity to break into my house.

And that's just the stuff I actively want hidden. There are a host of things that surveillance makes possible for dealing with people who are inconvenient to those in power:

• Have you read through all the laws that apply to you lately? Just kidding. There's a core of common sense, but around that is a vast thicket of arcane corners to get lost in. What are the odds that I could find a law you're breaking, if I looked hard enough?
• If you know where someone is at all times, it becomes much easier to frame them. Especially if they are trying to hide something - anything - from other people. You don't even need to make a case that will get a conviction; simply tying them up in years of court dates and legal expenses may be enough, not to mention the publicity effects of the "scandal".
• There's no need to directly go after the inconvenient person. You can often get the result by simply creating chaos in their personal lives. Find a spouse, a sibling, a child or a parent with a skeleton in the closet; expose it at the worst possible time.

I'm sure you can think of more. Knowledge is power, and the more of it you have the easier it is to remove obstacles from your way. Mere selective enforcement of the law is often enough, as any disliked minority can tell you.

My real life is - thankfully - nothing like what I've described above. But the people whose lives are like that are incredibly important to everyone else. The ones who stand up and fight against the powerful are rare and vital. I for one am prepared to tolerate a slightly higher risk of the crime du jour (drugs, terrorism, communists, etc) in the interests of keeping society free of entrenched corruption.

When you are thinking about security measures, it's important to bear in mind all of the threats you face, not merely the most spectacular or recent.

Knowing by faith

There is a common line of argument that says there are "other ways of knowing", and science can't tell you everything. Usually this is intended to counter a perceived lack of evidence for some supernatural belief or other, and usually it will cite either Godel's incompleteness theorem or some strong emotion like "love".

I have never seen such an argument that actually cited a piece of knowledge that is genuinely obtained other than by science (or some broadly similar approach), or mathematics (which is not about the real world until science connects the two).

Recently I ran into it yet again in a piece by Mehdi Hasan. Apart from trying to confuse "evidence" and "proof" (here's a tip for Mehdi: science doesn't prove anything, and doesn't claim to except in the sense of testing), he says that "...there are plenty of things that cannot be scientifically tested or proven but that we believe to be true, reasonable, obvious even." He gives some examples, all of which illustrate my claim.

"Which of these four pretty uncontroversial statements is scientifically testable? 1) Your spouse loves you. 2) The Taj Mahal is beautiful. 3) There are conscious minds other than your own. 4) The Nazis were evil." Taking these in order:

1) You can test this by formulating hypotheses of expected behavior, and comparing your spouse's actual behavior. Most people do. The word "spouse" implies some sort of commitment ceremony; there are major life adjustments, conversations, etc. Some of these might be evidence against; perhaps it's an arranged marriage, or an immigration scam. Perhaps there's been an affair, or perhaps they looked after you when you were broke. It's a tricky question - do you mean now, on average, on balance? How much love qualifies? What kind? For that matter, there are no doubt many people out there who know their spouse doesn't love them. This is far from uncontroversial. Science is improving in this area; one day we might be able to get a fairly useful answer with an MRI machine. 

None of this is helped by religious-style faith. You can't pray and find out an answer, or a lot of disastrous marriages might be avoided. And having faith without evidence that somebody loves you is often a good way to get a court order against you.

2) You investigate this scientifically the same way that Mehdi did - beauty is a subjective question, and something is beautiful if enough people think it is. What do people do with beautiful things? They visit them to look, and they report that they find them beautiful. So it is with the Taj Mahal. We have no need to take it on faith.

3) Once I have figured out what it means to be conscious, I can look for the signs in those around me. Most people accumulate sufficient evidence in early childhood. Indeed, a failure to do so is considered a clear-cut symptom of developmental problems. They don't do so by faith; they do so by overwhelming evidence. Later they can discover the science that shows their brains work the same way as everyone else's.

4) There's an enormous body of historical evidence documenting what the Nazis did and why. I'm certainly including such efforts in my definition of science. "Evil" is a more nebulous concept, but most people have no trouble applying it to mass murder. And there is plenty of evidence of choices taken where a good society would do one thing and the Nazis did another.

Faith, on the other hand, is more likely to get you into the land of conspiracy theories, of which there have been many over the years.

I am still waiting for some piece of knowledge that we can have without the testing of evidence. Mehdi's effort goes nowhere in this regard. Indeed, the people who think there is another way are never able to agree amongst themselves what that knowledge might be. Hence the huge variety of religions I see around me. That, to me, is evidence that they have not yet found another source.

Don't tell me what to wear!

A little while ago I heard a speech from someone in the arts, who quoted approvingly this dialog from "The Devil Wears Prada":
"You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff."

This particular person was in theatre, and from them it is a fair point. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard from someone that I really admired, how they had been inspired by someone - artist, composer, musician, author, playwright - who I have never heard of, don't care about, or even actively dislike.

But it doesn't apply to fashion. I have never heard anyone I admired wax lyrical about a fashion designer. Try this test - name a fashion designer who died before you were born. I don't know any. Now try that with artists, composers, sculptors, authors, poets... trivially easy. I have never seen anything that was identifiable as from a particular fashion designer that I thought was clearly well done, and usually the things that stand out are because they are bizarre or ridiculous. When I see really well-dressed people, they are invariably wearing something custom made for them.

When I saw that scene in the movie I was really hoping that Andy's character would serve up a counter-tirade, and I felt like yelling at the screen when she didn't. Don't get me wrong - it's a great movie, and it's a great line, expressing an attitude beautifully. But it's pure distilled rubbish.

See, Oscar de la Renta didn't invent cerulean. The word is 17th century, and derived from a much older word for a thing that has been around before there were humans. Oscar didn't invent a way to make clothing that color, or even a cheap way to make it. Some unsung chemist did that. Oscar didn't discover that it went really well with some other color - and even if he had, Andy isn't wearing the rest of his outfit. Oscar didn't decide that it went really well with Andy's eyes, because he's never met Andy. There might not even be any relationship at all between Oscar's gowns and Andy's sweater. Lots of people make decisions about what colors to make clothing in. Perhaps a Chinese factory owner liked it, or perhaps the apprentice mucked up a dye lot for topaz, and that's why it's in the bargain bin. And if Oscar had chosen vermilion instead, Andy wouldn't be wearing that; she'd be wearing some other color she liked.

The "people in this room" do have some influence over what's available. But they don't select for me from a pile of stuff. They throw some things into the pile, and I select things from it. If belts are wide this year, I will choose from the narrow end of the range. If they're narrow, I'll choose from the wide end. If they're ridiculous, I'll buy some of last year's stock from the bargain bins, or the year before's, or from some leather shop that doesn't follow fashions. If all the blues are lapis, I'll buy emerald, or perhaps a coat instead. Or maybe I'll just wait till next year.

The pile is smeared out in time by bargain bins and remainders and people who don't care, and second hand shops and my own cupboard, and by scissors and sewing machines if need be. Oscar would tell me not to wear cerulean because it's years out of date; Oscar would have selected something else from the pile. Oscar no longer thinks cerulean is even in the pile.

This is because the entire point of fashion is that it changes constantly. It's a way of showing that you're in the know, and you can't do that if there's no way to tell whether you're wearing this year's cerulean or last year's. Cerulean isn't better than topaz; it's just different. And if enough Andy's stop caring what's "in" this year, then Miranda Priestly will have to find honest work.

Or perhaps be reduced to advising individuals what will work for them. Which is much more likely to help actual people, because fashion tends to be displayed on walking clothes racks who are just this side of starvation. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as lucrative, because you only sell one instead of a few million.

If I felt like spending a heap of money on really nice clothes, I would not be going to the high fashion shops. I would find myself a tailor, who could make clothes that actually fit my slightly odd shape, instead of buying one size too big and cinching the belt and rolling the cuffs. And then maybe I'd be wearing clothes selected for me by someone else, but it'd be the tailor - based on what I actually look like - and not anyone in the treadmill that Miranda Priestly lives in.

And if we stop spending all that money on clothes, jobs will vanish from the clothing industry, but they will reappear somewhere else. The millions of dollars won't vanish - they just won't end up in Oscar's pocket. Some of it would end up in the pockets of a number of tailors. And some would pay for really nice health care facilities, or better schools, or any of the vast number of things we don't have enough money to do as well as we'd like.

No, Miranda, you don't decide what I wear. If you did, all the cool people would make sure to wear something else.

Protecting yourself

I originally started thinking about this when prompted by a Failbook entry (which I can't find) from someone saying he had no Zombie Survival plan, and suggesting that they were largely about the fantasy of being able to commit anti-social acts (killing people and taking their stuff) without looking like psychopaths. He was somewhat more concise, but that's the drift.

Then I found this which makes the very cogent argument that there appear to be large numbers of people who will fight tooth and nail to keep their guns, but won't lift a finger to keep all the other rights their guns are supposed to be protecting.

The United States, it seems to me, is all about taking the risk of living in freedom. We booted out the English (then one of the world's great powers, and arguably the greatest at the time). And we have since put up with the steady stream of casualties caused by widespread gun ownership, so that potential tyrants cannot take over by force (and indeed, so that they hopefully never try). But one well-executed terrorist attack has apparently made people perfectly willing to hand over all sorts of powers to governments, in the hope of protection from further attacks. Even (and sometimes especially) those who fight hardest for their guns - it seems to be a left-right thing.

So here's a very obvious point: the best time to protect your rights is when you have a lot of them, because the more of them you can protect, the easier all the others are to protect. It's much harder to organize a protest against TSA restrictions if you can be arrested for disturbing public peace. And a tyrannical government won't announce that it's arresting you for still having guns; it will arrest you for planning a terrorist attack, based on secret evidence.

And here's another: the best way to defend yourself from an oppressive government crackdown / zombie epidemic is to make sure it never happens. You might well prevail against an attack by government troops more than half the time (good luck, and ask the Syrian rebels what their casualty figures are like). But your chances of surviving no attack are much, much better. Especially when you're trying to live a normal life.

So sure, fight for your second amendment rights. But fight for all the other ones as well - don't let the government tap people's phone without a warrant, or assassinate people they don't like. And more importantly, fight for other people's rights as well - it's much easier to keep them for everyone than to argue that you should be special.

Rand Paul brought this into focus this week with his filibuster against the appointment of John Brennan. Now, I agree with Rand Paul on just about nothing. I think libertarianism is as wrong-headed as communism, just in a different direction. But on this he is 100% correct: the question of whether the government is permitted to assassinate US citizens without trial is absolutely vital. And the longer it goes unasked the harder it will be to reverse the ill effects of allowing such things.

In the words of the fifth amendment: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger..."
If the constitution can be ignored on such a crucial issue, nothing is safe. I would love to see the NRA's fervour put into pursuing this.

Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent.

Iran has in the last few years made a number of PR blunders involving photoshop fakes. There was the unlaunched missile; the drone prototype; the stealth jet flight that wasn't. And maybe the space monkey, although that seems a little more controversial.

The Iranians have not struck me as stupid or incompetent otherwise; they managed to take on an Iraqi regime backed by US help and not only fight it to a standstill but push it backwards. They are supposed to be on their way to building a nuclear weapon. And they seem to have hacked a US drone. They're smart enough to use Photoshop a bit better than that - even a heavily embargoed country would have no trouble getting copies of it to experiment with, especially one that didn't feel the need to pay for it.

They could just have a particularly incompetent PR department. They wouldn't be the first large organization with this problem. They could be a bunch of medieval religious nuts who don't appeal to the kind of smart people that would do this right - or at least tell them it wouldn't work - and yet still be dishonest enough to try it.

But I want to suggest another possibility. Saddam Hussein's Iraq had the problem in trying to avoid the second gulf war that it wanted the west to think it had no WMD (and therefore to leave it alone), but it wanted all its neighbours to think it did have them (and therefore to be fearful of it). Iran has a similar but more complicated problem: it wants the US to leave it alone, and therefore it needs nuclear weapons (having seen what happens to states that won't toe the line and don't have them). But the US also won't leave it alone if it thinks the Iranians do have them.

One solution, which the Iranians are clearly pursuing, is to build as much of the capacity as possible but not the weapons. That way, they can legitimately claim not to have them, but they can also make it clear that if they are threatened the weapons can be made quickly.

Another is to try to separate the two classes of decision makers. Iran needs to convince the US military that they have nuclear weapons, in order for them to work as a deterrent. But the people who would decide to attack Iran because they are building nuclear weapons is a much larger and more nebulous group, and it includes the US public. Somehow they need to convince the US military that they have nukes, and convince the US public that they don't.

Enter the photoshop strategy. By routinely making very public idiots of themselves - in ways that will be rapidly spread on social media - they may be hoping to convince the public that Iran isn't really a threat. After Iraq, the public will be naturally suspicious of claims that such-and-such has WMD. Channeling Comical Ali may be just the strategy they need; they can make big blustery claims and have them periodically debunked, giving an impression of a bunch of incompetents who can't possibly be building nuclear weapons.

Professional analysts will presumably not be fooled (or to be more precise, their judgements are hopefully based on more than Iranian press-releases). The military will still get the message. But the public will be very reluctant to get into a war that looks very much like Iraq but on a larger scale - easy victories on the way in, and a quagmire for years afterwards with Islamic suicide bombers killing off US troops, all for weapons that don't really exist.

It's a very flaky-sounding idea, and not something you'd want to rely on. If they really are doing anything like this it will doubtless be one part of a much larger effort. But who knows - reading the histories of Allied attempts to hoax the Germans in WWII, they did some pretty outlandish things, and some of them really worked.

I often wish there was a way to definitively know the answers to questions like this once they have ceased to be militarily relevant.

Thinking is hard

Alvin Platinga argues that the combination of evolutionary theory and naturalism is self-defeating on the basis of the claim that if both evolution and naturalism are true, then the probability of having reliable cognitive faculties is low.

Others better trained in philosophy than me have argued the logic of this; I want to make a more empirical point. His aim is to argue that since we do in fact have reliable cognitive facilities, they must have come from God. But to do this, he needs to show that we have them. This is far from clear.

Human abilities at logical reasoning are very unreliable in general. If you pay any attention to politics, I need only point you to the debates in your local legislature, and the opinion pieces of those that cover them. If you have any grounding in philosophy, I suggest that you google "reasoning fallacies". If you have neither of those things, pay attention to the reasoning behind the next argument you hear at the pub.

But perhaps the most cogent demonstration of this is a persistent theme at the big picture, a summary of which is what made me finally write this post.
That's right. When it comes to what people care about most - money - where the application of cool, logical reasoning would be most advantageous - investment decisions - what are people like? They are terrible.

I have a theory about why this is: homo politicus. Humans are a social species, and that means who cooperates with who is terribly important. We have learned to argue by trying to convince others to take our side, or not to help our opponents. When you're doing that, actual truth is a fairly secondary consideration - what counts is what the person you're speaking to thinks and knows. A classic example of this is the argumentum ad baculum (agree or I'll beat you up). A lousy argument from a logical perspective; an excellent one in tribal politics. But of course, the better you tailor your argument to reality (or at least reality as understood by the other person) the more successful you'll be.

Having learned some of that, we are now applying it to reality. It's taken us a long time to get it right, and it remains very hard work. You could argue that science is at heart an attempt to remove as much politics as possible from the analysis of reality (so, it's not enough to beat someone at a debate - you have to show them how they can convince themselves that you're right. Imagine that standard applied to politics!).

A couple of examples to illustrate:

There is a logical puzzle which is difficult enough to be worth asking as an interview question (and I have been asked it). You are shown four cards, which you are told have a letter on one side and a number on the other. You can see that the cards are marked 12, V, 31, L. Which cards must you turn over to verify the rule that all cards with a letter in the second half of the alphabet have a number over 20? Many people get it wrong. I had to think carefully before answering the first time I saw it. It's an abstract reasoning problem.

Now let me rephrase it. You walk into a bar and see four people. A 12 year old, a vodka drinker, a 31 year old, and a lemonade drinker. Who do you need to check on if alcohol is only legal for those over 18? That one's easy, because it's a social rule.

Next, consider the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Compare them to the two logical stages of grief: confirmation, acceptance. Now, consider that the bad news you just got is that one of your faction is defecting. Which one makes most sense? That's right - humans deal with the universe as just another person, because that's the enormous hammer that evolution has given us.

Go back to your physics lessons. How often were you told that "water seeks a level" or that one thing was "attracted" to another, or that some phenomenon obeyed a "law" (a human social construct)?

Humans make brilliant scientists, when you consider the tools we're working with. We've done extraordinarily well with what we have, but we shouldn't mistake our achievements for reliable cognitive abilities. When large chunks of the population still believe in tarot cards, horoscopes, divination, homeopathy, and creationism, we're a long way from "reliable". No matter what the real explanation for this is, the phenomenon is undeniable. Platinga, like humanity, has a lot more work to do.