Atheist church has first schism

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

You mean aside from your 'China accounts for just over half of the world's atheists' and my personal anecdote about Canada's atheism situation?

Does living in China necessitate that you are a "big fan[...] of Traditional Chinese Medicine" and that you "don't like hearing criticism about it"? I'd say that that's a large claim to make without offering any evidence in support.

There is such a thing as 'makes sense'[...]

Indeed there is. What it's not, though, is something that's proven a particularly good way of determining the truth about the world. Evidence is the way to do that. There are plenty of things which make sense which are also untrue. You made a claim. If you want me to accept it as true, you will have to offer some evidence to support that claim.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Just to elaborate a bit... this is what's called a general or distributed skill. An analogy would be 'cooperation' or 'communicating' which are general or distributed skills that are being taught at all times, in all courses, without an assignment or test specifically dedicated to it.

So then you are defining "critical thinking" so broadly as to rob it of almost all meaning. That's what I thought.

 

[blutoski]

I'm more critical thinking than thou.

I appreciate the concern that it's bad optics for me, but I decided to put my cards on the table even though it will risk insulting people.

I relied on the objective scoring and feedback from experts (like Dale) for self-evaluation and comparison against population norms.

I would put my nickel down and bet that only a few dozen of the tens of thousands of skeptics have ever objectively evaluated their critical thinking skills. It's Lake Wobegon, basically.

 

[blutoski]

By that definition, anybody doing or saying anything is applying critical thinking.

No, just people evaluating arguments. It's a specific type of task.

I would say that there is a difference. What people call themselves need not be the same as how they act. There was a movement a while ago where some atheists rebranded themselves as "brights". Does them referring to themselves as such mean that they were intelligent?

Someone who describes themselves as a sceptic need not actually apply scepticism to the world around them.

Agreed. I think that was my point. Many skeptics are not practicing skepticism. That's why I understand why the claim that skepticism may be a culture of people with shared beliefs is a perfectly valid model.

I'd like a citation for that too, please.

You just have to read their annual objectives and curricula. I'm not sure if you recall, but last year, NCSE tried to mobilize resistance to Texas dropping critical thinking from their public school objectives.

I can get into the details of why critical thinking is not as protective as we suspect. Mostly it has to do with our evaluation of a premise's strength, which is just very cultural and subjective.

 

[Humes fork]

Sure they are!

Notice we are two skeptics disagreeing on what critical thinking is!

"Critical thinking" is a concept (formerly called "informal logic") that exists independently of organized skepticism. The skeptical movement promotes critical thinking, but did not invent it.

You can find critical thinking courses in universities, commonly in the philosophy departments. And at least the course I took was about evaluating arguments, premises, conclusions. What is a valid argument, what is a cogent argument. Also to read letters to the editors and then reconstruct them into premises and conclusions. That sort of thing.

It was never taught in elementary school, or even high school.

The Skeptic's Dictionary also has a page for critical thinking, which is pretty much the stuff I mentioned. He has a background of teaching critical thinking at university.

 

[Humes fork]

The claim I'm disputing is that my collecting evidence was not critical thinking. You were mocking me for supplying evidence. The opponents have no evidence at all, from what I can tell.

What I'm disputing is that it was a good piece of evidence. I mean, how can anyone assert the ability of skeptics in say the UK, Sweden, Germany etc, from pubs in British Columbia?

It's also a mundane claim: that skeptics are ordinary people - I think the burden of proof is on anybody who wants to claim otherwise, which means I think you have shifted the burden of proof, and that I have gone above and beyond, being the only party who has tried to disprove my own theory. They are claiming Skeptics are an exception, and you do not appear to be giving them grief for an unsubstantiated claim.

I think your evaluation of the situation was completely backwards.

Wait a moment. Had you said that skeptics on average are not really better than the general public, that would be one thing, and it should be the default position because as you say skeptics are ordinary people. But you said skeptics are worse at it than ordinary people.

 

[blutoski]

So then you are defining "critical thinking" so broadly as to rob it of almost all meaning. That's what I thought.

Well, two things:

• I don't think that describing critical thinking as evaluating arguments robs it of meaning. The key word being evaluating (as opposed to 'spewing' or 'reciting' &c)
• This is not my personal definition, but I do appreciate that it's summarized to fit into one sentence.

I think this supports my earlier claim that skeptics have their own cultural definition of critical thinking.

When I explain that critical thinking is taught in K-12 in the US and Canada, I'm using the term the way it's used by people who work in the fields of philosophy and education. It's not my personal opinion. As I said in earlier posts: there are years of discussion in the JREF Forums / Education section worth reading. We have members who are teachers in the US and Canada and professors of philosophy, and they have had interesting conversations about the relative dearth of connection between critical thinking and skeptical thinking.

(My opinion: whether critical thinking increases skeptical thinking or not, we still need more of it in the education system, as it is associated with other outcomes that I prefer to see in the next generation of citizens.)

That skeptics might want something different than conventional critical thinking, so want to invent their own type of critical thinking and promote that is exactly a point I was making earlier in the thread. It may or may not be a good idea, but there was not even the remotest attempt to prove that before pegging it onto a 'skeptical to do' list.

 

[Dinwar]

By that definition, anybody doing or saying anything is applying critical thinking.

Critical thinking is often differentiated from fallacious thinking, such as blind acceptance ("My country, right or wrong!"), racism ("You can't trust those Chinese"), appeals to tradition ("But we've always worked this way"), etc. Critical thinking is actually examining the quality of the argument. Evaluation of the quality of the data is typically considered something else, usually science.

I'd like a citation for that too, please.

My alma matre specifically instituted a program for incoming freshmen geared towards increasing critical thinking. I was asked to help with that. I was paid--a pathetic sum, really just beer money, but hey, I've done worse for beer money! Our uniforms constitute the only thing I own in my school's colors (everything else was department stuff--t-shirts, mugs, and the like).

My wife, when she was doing student teaching, also had to deal with such programs. We used to laugh about how pathetic they were. All of these programs are about buzzwords, not about actually teaching critical thinking; still, they were a requirement in the California schools she was teaching in. I don't recall off-hand if the requirements were due to the state or due to the school administration.

Google "Common Core Standards Critical Thinking" and a number of links will pop up.

 

[blutoski]

What I'm disputing is that it was a good piece of evidence. I mean, how can anyone assert the ability of skeptics in say the UK, Sweden, Germany etc, from pubs in British Columbia?

I would say that this is one of those 'who has the burden of proof' questions, then.

Do I have to prove representativeness, or do you have to prove significant differences.

What is the reasonable baseline assumption: that skeptics vary a lot from region to region, or that we're pretty similar?

Wait a moment. Had you said that skeptics on average are not really better than the general public, that would be one thing, and it should be the default position because as you say skeptics are ordinary people. But you said skeptics are worse at it than ordinary people.

I said they were no better, and possibly worse. There were many surveys. Most were average, some were worse than average. None were better. A colleague crunched the numbers for me, and there's a 99% confidence on normalcy, 95% confidence on worse.

Depending on whether you accept 95% confidence as acceptable for this type of survey, a person may or may not accept 'worse' as true, so I labelled it as 'possibly'.

 

[blutoski]

"Critical thinking" is a concept (formerly called "informal logic") that exists independently of organized skepticism. The skeptical movement promotes critical thinking, but did not invent it.

Absolutely! My point was that regardless of what's defined out there (eg: science vs pseudoscience, critical thinking) skepticism has internal confusion about it. My thinking is that this makes us less effective when we venture out into the real world with projects.

Itwas never taught in elementary school, or even high school.

Probabaly not the college level material, no. But that doesn't mean the core premises aren't and you may not really be aware. That's why the general population has a baseline competence in critical thinking. We do learn a lot of the skills.

The Skeptic's Dictionary also has a page for critical thinking, which is pretty much the stuff I mentioned. He has a background of teaching critical thinking at university.

I don't understand why you posted the link. I think we're talking past each other.

 

[blutoski]

Does living in China necessitate that you are a "big fan[...] of Traditional Chinese Medicine" and that you "don't like hearing criticism about it"? I'd say that that's a large claim to make without offering any evidence in support.

And I'd say it's pretty straightforward. We could investigate as follows:

• what portion of China is atheist
• what portion of China defend TCM strongly

I'll bet money we're talking the vast, vast majority in both circumstances. Regression analysis would probably show an overlap of a solid billion people.

Indeed there is. What it's not, though, is something that's proven a particularly good way of determining the truth about the world. Evidence is the way to do that. There are plenty of things which make sense which are also untrue. You made a claim. If you want me to accept it as true, you will have to offer some evidence to support that claim.

Mmmm... it depends. I'm saying that a country known for atheism and TCM adherence probably has a huge number of atheists who ahere to TCM. I think those are two facts that fit together nicely by themselves to support my claim.

You want more, which suggests you're questioning one or both of those facts. Either that China doesn't have a lot of atheists, or China doesn't have a lot of strong defenders of TCM. I think this is the point where you're making the claim that needs support.

 

[Humes fork]

I may not have been clear in the previous postings. Barry Beyerstein was on the Committee and he engaged us to help with the decision.

So they said explicitly that they changed their name to accommodate the Skeptics Society?

I never made that claim. I made the opposite claim. Organized skepticism used to be restricted to paranormal claims. It has since expanded.

Yeah, and the expansion is pseudoscience, right? If so, it has to be explained how the Swedish Skeptics (founded in 1982 directly inspired by CSICOP) could focus on pseudoscience right from the beginning. And when did this expansion take place? It must have happened before 1992, because already the earliest issues of Skeptic magazine deals with pseudoscience. So do in fact very early articles (late 70s and early 80s) of Skeptical Inquirer.

NESS.

Ok, but surely they must qualify as "old" skeptics, given that they were just a few years later than Skeptics Society, and same year as JREF? And the SGU is simply their stuff, just that it appears on a podcast, which hardly existed back in the mid-90s. Or can you show that their scope expanded?

I think organized skepticism is not living up to its potential for reasons that are ironic: skeptics do not apply their approach on the movement itself.

This is a valid concern.

My interest is in the organizations' effectiveness. I believe we should build policies based on true facts, rather than beliefs. I belive we should set clear goals, and only allocate our limited resources to the ones that can be proven to achieve those goals.

I agree. But you seem to think that (organized) skepticism makes things worse.

It is precisely because I believe skepticism is a great approach that I am critical of organizations that are rudderlessly circling, achieving little, and burning up millions of dollars doing so.

But effects of such kind are hard to measure. While TAM might appear to be a circle-jerk, it might also trigget attendees to start local skeptical groups at home.

What I have concluded from my experience is that skepticism is a very human movement, unclear on its goals, unclear on critical facts, surprisingly uninterested in self-reflection. The result is a somewhat rudderless collection of 'clubs' that prioritize pursuing activities that the members personally enjoy.

I agree with this somewhat, but I would not go quite as far. As to their goals, it is pretty explicitly stated on their sites.

In contrast, skeptical societies do not say "we think everybody should be into science and critical thinking because we personally enjoy it" - the claim is that sharing these subjects and skills will make a better society, but it's an unproven claim. I think the main motive is that we all personally enjoy these things and want to share our hobby with the world, just like with my swimming club.

But is it? Or is it very far-fetched? Modern industrial society relies very much on science and technology. Issues facing the human species, such as global warming, how to feed a growing population, are all scientific in nature.

My history is that I took several years to notice the gap between these beliefs and their underlying evidence. Over time, things went from bad to worse: we went from having untested hypotheses to testing that showed evidence they were probably wrong. At the time, I was naiive and thought bringing this to a board of skeptics who said they listened to the evidence was going to be an interesting discussion. Instead, I was speaking to their 'inner lawyer' - motivated thinking defending beliefs obtained through ordinary means (culture &c).

So this is the state of my relationship with organized skepticism right now.
I'm waiting for somebody to plot a course, and I don't have the time or energy to do it myself.

Ok, so what do you think should be done? Tuning more bicycles (couldn't resist)?

 

[Dinwar]

And I'd say it's pretty straightforward. We could investigate as follows:

• what portion of China is atheist
• what portion of China defend TCM strongly

I'll bet money we're talking the vast, vast majority in both circumstances. Regression analysis would probably show an overlap of a solid billion people.

My question would be, how many are ACTUALLY atheists? In other words, how many are atheists because the government tells them they are atheists? I've heard of a rather large population of underground Christians in China, though the source (a priest) leaves something to be desired. Also, the issue of what constitutes a god will come up. Are cultures that engage in ancestor worship atheistic? That sort of thing.

 

[Humes fork]

What is the reasonable baseline assumption: that skeptics vary a lot from region to region, or that we're pretty similar?

I don't understand. Did you say before that "skeptic" is a meaningless term due to five or so "major rifts" (that you never listed)?

I said they were no better, and possibly worse. There were many surveys. Most were average, some were worse than average. None were better. A colleague crunched the numbers for me, and there's a 99% confidence on normalcy, 95% confidence on worse.

Depending on whether you accept 95% confidence as acceptable for this type of survey, a person may or may not accept 'worse' as true, so I labelled it as 'possibly'.

Ok, then that is a more modest claim. Still, your claim that skepticism is a belief system is clearly wrong. It's as wrong as saying science is a belief system.

 

[Humes fork]

Absolutely! My point was that regardless of what's defined out there (eg: science vs pseudoscience, critical thinking) skepticism has internal confusion about it. My thinking is that this makes us less effective when we venture out into the real world with projects.

If someone disagrees with the established definitions, then that person is wrong. Regardless if he/she self-identifies as a skeptic or not.

Probabaly not the college level material, no. But that doesn't mean the core premises aren't and you may not really be aware. That's why the general population has a baseline competence in critical thinking. We do learn a lot of the skills.

Which of the skills do we learn? And why doesn't it show in the general public?

I don't understand why you posted the link. I think we're talking past each other.

To illustrate that there is an established concept of what critical thinking consists of.

 

[blutoski]

So they said explicitly that they changed their name to accommodate the Skeptics Society?

No, not accomodate. Compete.

Shermer had opened up skepticism to 'everythingology' - that really grew the potential market for membership. And *cough, cough* legacies.

This is a valid concern.

I apologize if I have frustrated yourself and the other readers of this thread, because this is my overarching motive for continuing to participate on forums &c.

I agree. But you seem to think that (organized) skepticism makes things worse.

Only in the way that multivitamins are harmful. Lost opportunities to do something better with the resources, tiny risk of making things worse.

But effects of such kind are hard to measure. While TAM might appear to be a circle-jerk, it might also trigget attendees to start local skeptical groups at home.

Just addressing that example of a potential benefit: if the goals are incorrect, then that's expanding the problem, spawning more copies of a bad model.

There is potential for a skeptical society to spin off and set objectively verified agendas, of course. I suspect they would be considered quite the rogues.

I agree with this somewhat, but I would not go quite as far. As to their goals, it is pretty explicitly stated on their sites.

Yes, I'm challenging the goals, is what I'm saying. One of the other things I learned as a director at nonprofits is that goals should be challenged, some goals may be there for the wrong reasons. The most common bad reason is empire building.

But is it? Or is it very far-fetched? Modern industrial society relies very much on science and technology. Issues facing the human species, such as global warming, how to feed a growing population, are all scientific in nature.

I think there are many reasons to advocate for more science. My dream job would be to work at Science World here in Vancouver, and I'm the type of parent who wanted his kids to be able to install a LAMP server from scratch. There are organizations dedicated to doing this today, so what's skepticism's special interest?

Skepticism's special claim that I challenge is that they're linking vague science advocacy to a change in the public's attitude toward the paranormal or pseudoscience. Since the real benefits appear to only be linked with graduate natural science degrees, I don't feel there's a lot that skeptical organizations can really do to have a concrete impact... so: does that impact any organization's resource allocation to such projets? I think it should.

Ok, so what do you think should be done? Tuning more bicycles (couldn't resist)?

I actually advocate two changes.

• organizations need to determine if their primary goal is external, internal, or both... are the resources intended to benefit the members or the public (or both - just be clear)
• a re-assessment of project worth based on the above and available data, and probably downscaling of overall projects until we can sort it out with better data

 

[blutoski]

If someone disagrees with the established definitions, then that person is wrong. Regardless if he/she self-identifies as a skeptic or not.

I agree.

But there is a strong element within skepticism that would disagree with us.
They would tell us not to worship Dr. Carroll just because he lives in his academic ivory tower. That the way you presented your evidence was an "Appeal to Authority"

Which of the skills do we learn? And why doesn't it show in the general public?

Varying degrees of argument analysis, weighing the value of premises, &c.

I would argue that it does show up in the general public.
As I said, I've run these inventories for years, and I've never seen a score of zero.
There is a baseline skill that people absorb through education and life experiences.

The postsecondary courses are certainly more advanced and one would hope increase scoring on these inventories. That seems to be the case, with some caveats.

What's not clear is three things that directly impact the value of Skepticism's vague advocacy of critical thinking:

• whether any of the deliberate exposure to courses increase ability to perform critical thinking (the belief that critical thinking can be taught)
• whether that effect is permanent without reinforcement (the belief that critical thinking courses will change the population in the long run)
• whether it will create the skeptical outcomes claimed (eg: does better critical thinking actually make people less vulnerable to fraud) (the belief that critical thinking = skeptical thinking)

To illustrate that there is an established concept of what critical thinking consists of.

I wasn't disputing that there was an established definition.
I was saying that skeptics on the ground don't seem to agree.

For example: when Dale and I ran 'evaluating scientific claims' workshops at Skeptics in the Pub, we spent most of our time dealing with people who had very different opinions, and we were dealing with a great deal of resistance and even anger. Dale's qualifications as a philosophy instructor and cofounder of CSICOP were rejected wholesale as a valueless appeal to authority.

 

[blutoski]

My question would be, how many are ACTUALLY atheists? In other words, how many are atheists because the government tells them they are atheists? I've heard of a rather large population of underground Christians in China, though the source (a priest) leaves something to be desired.

Yes, that's why I reduced my estimate to about a billion, instead of 1.3 Billion, which would be the whole Chinese population. Most statistics show that a portion of China has deity worship. I took that into account, but yes I was rounding.

Also, the issue of what constitutes a god will come up. Are cultures that engage in ancestor worship atheistic? That sort of thing.

Sure: What's an atheist? What's a skeptic?
I'm going with self identification at this point, same criteria for both definitions.

We could quibble, but that is actually one of my points: no universal definition of what it means to be a skeptic. Lots of common beliefs, though, which is how we find each other and get along as well as we do.

 

[blutoski]

I don't understand. Did you say before that "skeptic" is a meaningless term due to five or so "major rifts" (that you never listed)?

I don't think I said it was a meaningless term.

I will have to check back, but I think I was saying that skeptics don't agree on what it means, which causes schisms.

I did list the major rifts in a few other threads, but one that was high on the list was climate change.

Paraphrasing Daniel Loxton: "When it really mattered, Skepticism fell down. As an actual movement, we cannot be relied on to tell the public what is good or bad science."

Ok, then that is a more modest claim. Still, your claim that skepticism is a belief system is clearly wrong. It's as wrong as saying science is a belief system.

I never said it was a belief system.

I may have said that skeptics disagree on what exactly it means to be a skeptic: some believe it is doubt, some believe it is iconoclasm, some believe it is special skills at critical thinking, some believe skepticism is a collection of beliefs.

People are drawn into skepticism for different reasons and routes, so the membership has different goals and conflict arises.

 

[blutoski]

Ok, then that is a more modest claim.

I think it's a modest claim, but that view is not shared widely, as it directly challenges a strong belief within skepticism that we come to different conclusions than non-skeptics because we are better critical thinkers.

The alternative explanations are:

• we have absorbed different basic facts
• we value certain sources of information higher/lower than non-skeptics