Program Archive - Capital District Humanist Society

Melanie Trecek-King is an Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit College, who spoke about “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds.”

She began with a 1954 cult story, the “Seekers,” led by one Dorothy Martin, involving Jesus, aliens in flying saucers, and predictions of Earth’s imminent destruction on December 21. Believers prepared to be saved, jettisoning all metal, including tooth fillings, which would have interfered with saucer navigation.

Trecek-King focused on what people believe, and why. The meaning of “belief” is actually a tricky question. She defined it simply as “things you think are true;” and act upon (whether true or not). Positing two basic sources for beliefs: 1) personal experiences, with the example of feeling better after homeopathic treatment (i.e., no actual treatment, but there’s still a placebo effect), and 2) received wisdom, accepting the beliefs of people around us.

Trecek-King noted we are social primates, programmed by evolution to trust in the group. We do tend to trust our tribe-mates, but they’re are not necessarily dependable. Placing trust wisely, she said, is incredibly important.

She cited philosopher W.V. Quine who characterized beliefs as forming a web, with “core beliefs” at the center, most closely linked to one’s personal identity, influencing the rest, and being hardest to change. We’ll hold to a core belief, even if incorrect, if it serves to make everything else make sense.

So again, beliefs are most tenacious if tied to one’s sense of identity; Trecek King said that “social death is worse than physical death.” If that sounds like hyperbole, she cited the example of people clinging to Covid denialism — even while themselves dying of Covid.

There’s also a dichotomy between falsifiable beliefs, capable of being refuted by evidence, and others that cannot be. The latter are subjective beliefs — for example, “abortion is murder” — that actually tend to be the ones held most strongly. And for those we make excuses, to fend off any seeming contrary evidence.

Confirmation bias is, more generally, the embrace of information supporting pre-existing beliefs, while dismissing discordant information. Smarter people are actually more prone to this, being better at coming up with rationales for rejecting the latter.

Trecek-King invoked psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and rider. The elephant is one’s unconscious, and is much bigger and more powerful, yet the rider — one’s conscious self — thinks they’re directing it. Mostly the rider is just coming up with justifications for the elephant’s choices.

But overconfidence is the real enemy. There was discussion of the Dunning-Kruger effect: limited competence tends to make people over-estimate their abilities. Or: their dumbness makes them think they’re smart.

Her “take home” message was: train your elephant. Be caring, skeptical, humble. She also suggested an exercise, applied to some belief you hold. How sure are you it’s true? Why? How would you feel if you’re wrong? What evidence would change your mind?

But in today’s America we have a problem of people inhabiting different realities, with indeed different understandings of how reality works.

Returning to the story of the “Seekers,” when December 21 arrived, nothing happened. At first this threw them for a loop. But then Dorothy said she’d received a message: in fact, it was their steadfastness that saved the world from its otherwise certain doom. So they sallied forth with redoubled faith in their crazy belief system.

Kyle Polich is a podcaster whose talk was titled “Skepticism in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

He began with a re-titling: “A Staircase to the Moon? The Path to AGI.” AGI stands for “Artificial General Intelligence,” which would resemble the kind of intelligence we humans have, and which AI currently does not. Polich’s metaphor was that to go to the Moon, you could build a staircase, which would get you part-way, but would soon prove the wrong approach — as opposed to building rockets. He posed the question whether current AI efforts are staircase-equivalents for getting to AGI.

A main theme was elucidating why AI has progressed as much as it has in just the last few years. Polich said it was really a matter of solving math problems. What current AI iterations basically do is turn language problems into math problems it’s capable of solving. An AI will be trained for that by exposing it to a vast amount of diverse human-generated texts, from books that have been put online, Wikipedia, and general internet crawls, etc. Its basic task is then predicting what word comes next in a sequence. It does this by converting words into numbers, and figuring out language patterns — what words most typically go with each other. By testing itself to guess the missing word in a sequence, then checking if it was right, done a zillion times, it gets pretty good at predicting the next word. That’s all ChatGPT is really doing when asked to compose, say, a sonnet about peanut butter in the style of Allen Ginsburg.

But this, again, is not General Artificial Intelligence. In this context Polich discussed the “Turing Test,” in which a human converses with an AI to judge whether they’re talking to another human or not. Polich deemed this an “unbiased double-blind test,” and posited that today’s AIs have not passed it.

He also introduced the term ASI — “Artificial Super Intelligence,” which would be able to do, well, everything. Unlike any human. There’s some concern that such an entity could wreak havoc with our economies, our cultures, etc. But Polich deemed that threat far distant, expressing more concern about mis-use of AI in human hands, for example to wage bioterrorism, or create fake news, even personalized for the recipient. Yet he cited nuclear weapons, which we’ve had for decades without using.

He meanwhile put forth a list of ways in which AI differs importantly from humans. Like, no embodiment — many researchers posit that our human consciousness is not just a matter of what goes on in our brains, but their connection with our bodies is highly important. Similarly, AI has no pain, no emotions, no motivations. However, those could be emergent properties that arise from neuron-like information processing. Indeed, many theorize that that’s how our own consciousness originates.

Polich concluded by voicing his view that, with AI, we’re not engaged in building a staircase to the Moon — we’re building a rocket.

Kate Cohen is a Washington Post columnist and author of We of Little Faith – Why I stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too). Her talk was titled, “America Needs Atheists Now More Than Ever.”

Because someone, she said, is trying to take away our liberties — and it’s not Joe Biden. Whereas our First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, now “Christian Nation” zealots are reinterpreting that — with Supreme Court backing — to mean freedom of religion from other laws and requirements.

Cohen began by talking about her Jewish childhood — how she never really believed, but went along with the religion, feeling that that was what one was supposed to do, to be a good person. She characterized Judaism as mostly praising God — a fictional character with a desperate desire to be worshipped. But she was reluctant to admit that reality — like many people, not wanting to be part of a feared and reviled minority. She noted that women, generally, tend to identify as atheists less often than do men, because they’re more attuned toward “getting along.”

And she thought atheism was more complicated than it really is. One doesn’t have to be a strict materialist — can feel blessed, hope, and faith — in other people. And cosmic wonderment. In other words, big feelings about big things, but without giving that a big word (“God”).

One can reject that concept without having to come up with some alternative but equivalent cosmic hypothesis. Like a theory for how the Big Bang occurred. It’s okay to just say, “I don’t know.”

And how do we know there’s no God? We don’t have to. Nor can we prove the nonexistence of other kinds of mythical beasts. God is just one more like them. [The impossibility of proving there’s no God is a philosophical non-sequitur; one cannot prove a negative; the burden of proof is on the advocate for a proposition; and extraordinary claims (which certainly include religious ones) require extraordinary proof. — FSR]

Cohen read a section of the book relating how she handled their questions when her small boys were reading about Greek myths. Which people may have believed at one time. Contemporary religions are myths that some people believe today, which are no different — likewise made up. That’s what she told her kids, pulling no punches. She wanted them to exist in the real world.

She also said that being an atheist, one needn’t give up Christmas — the word being a shorthand for the “culturally religious soup” we all live in. It’s okay to indulge in these cultural practices. One doesn’t have to take a vow of purity to be an atheist.

Her book, in the end, is mainly a plea to be honest with oneself, and one’s children.

Recap prepared by Frank S Robinson

Our November in-person meeting was very well attended, with great food! Plus a bunch more folks on zoom.

The speaker was Joseph Simonetta on “How to Sustain Humanity, Advance Our Civilization, and Succeed as a Species.”

Much of the talk explicated how small Earth is in relation to cosmic immensity. Then he detailed our species’ evolutionary antecedents; then the development of religions; and the problems confronting us — climate change, species extinction, pollution, conflict, etc. All to make the point that religion and the behaviors it inspires are antiquated and ill-suited to confronting the challenges of modern life. Quoting Einstein that we can’t solve our problems with the same level of thinking from which they originated.
Which is absurd, fundamentally wrong, and needs to change. Though Simonetta could suggest no path to such change. He did stress seven key words: Be healthy; be kind; respect the environment.

Abhijit Chanda is the founder of “Rationable,” a YouTube channel. (The name does not refer to things subject to rationing, but rather rationality.) He joined us from India, speaking about “Alternative Health Practices and Pseudoscience.”

A starting point was to query reasons for the popularity of “alternative” medicine as opposed to the conventional (real) sort. Chanda characterized the latter, in America, as not exactly user-friendly. People recoil from giant institutions like government, insurance companies, and big pharma. Mainstream doctors often seem cold and brusque, in contrast to “alternative” practitioners exuding warmth. Many people take modern medicine for granted, while venerating “traditional” treatments as better fitted to their beliefs, philosophies, and psychologies. As opposed to critical thinking.

But he suggested that critical thinking doesn’t necessarily correlate with intelligence. In that regard, he cited Steve Jobs, certainly a very intelligent guy, who insisted on treating his cancer outside of mainstream medicine. Didn’t work out well.

There’s also the appeal of the word “natural,” with the idea that it equates to “good.” Wow is that wrong; Chanda called it the “naturalistic fallacy.” Humanity’s whole history is a battle against nature; it can kill you. That’s not to say we don’t get some useful treatments from nature, like penicillin. But it requires science to separate what’s good from what’s bad.

Proponents of “alternative” treatments often do make scientific claims. But Chanda was pretty dismissive of that. It’s typically window-dressing rather than real science, producing the conclusions the “researcher” wants to get. He cited the example of a Covid cure touted as 100% effective in trials. Well, to start with, 97% of people don’t get Covid in the first place. (The purveyor eventually backed off the claim, instead saying his snake oil “boosts immunity.” Whatever that might actually mean.)

Yet numerous people insist that even stuff like homeopathy — which is literally no treatment at all — helps them. Of course that’s the placebo effect, which is quite powerful. It throws a monkey-wrench into any attempt at rational discussion.

Another word often thrown around is “energy.” (Chanda displayed a website piling on the feel-good lingo, hawking “Holistic Calming Energy.”) He said these folks actually don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to “energy” (which is actually not some Jedi-like force, but prosaically defined as “the ability to do work”). Related here is the notion of a “life force” that somehow emanates within us (“vitalism”). That just ain’t how things work.

Chanda focused particularly on “Ayurveda” practice, originating in India. The word loosely translates as “knowledge of life.” Another of his targets was Reiki, which he said is not, contrary to common belief, some “ancient wisdom,” but invented in the 1920s by one Mikao Usui. Who died at 60, not exactly a great advertisement for Reiki’s health benefits.

The basic problem with all this stuff is that it’s grounded in ignorance of the true causes of disease and illness. Ayurveda is ancient — long predating germ theory! And typically it relies on the archaic concept that illness is caused by some sort of imbalance among bodily “humours.” It was that kind of thinking that, for centuries, made bloodletting an all-purpose treatment for any malady (it killed George Washington). We now know it’s complete bunk.

Chanda’s final takeaway: Just let science do its thing. (What world is he living in?)

Our first in-person monthly meeting in 3-1/2 years must be rated a real success. About 14 people showed up, with half again as many participating by zoom. Thank you to Don Porterfield’s great efforts in getting the technological ducks lined up. The attendees seemed very pleased. And of course, for them, unlike for the zoomers, there was food! (We won’t mention the sex.)

The speaker was Chris Johnson, a film-maker and photographer, who spoke about his book and film project, “A Better Life – Joy and Meaning in a World Without God.” (Now that we’ve killed him.) He financed the project via crowd-sourcing using Kickstarter; then traveled the world, talking to a hundred people, including the likes of Dan Barker, Julia Sweeney, and philosopher A.C. Grayling. And he’s given the presentation in 125 places.

His aim, he said, was to change the conversation, from a focus on what we don’t believe in. Johnson started with some clips of people expressing very negative stereotypes of atheists. The question for him, though, is – given rejection of supernatural tropes – how do we then navigate the world?

We were shown a clip of philosopher/neuroscientist Patricia Churchland, addressing what an atheist does about Christmas. She noted that it’s an ancient pagan celebration – the Winter Solstice. And it’s fine to just do any rituals that happen to please one. She likened thusly participating in Christmas to playing in a game of Monopoly. You can partake without literal belief in the houses, hotels, and money.

One of those featured was Alex Honnold, a “free solo” rock climber, shown working his way up a vast vertical Yosemite cliff face, without ropes or the like. Obviously, death is possible. But then again, actually, it’s a certainty for everyone – eventually. And that “eventually” is not really too far distant. Honnold was quoted that not believing in an afterlife forces him to get the most out of the life he does have. A key point for Johnson is that knowing what a limited time we have does impel us to do what fulfills us.

Ryan Cragun is a sociologist with a flair for statistics. His talk was titled “Religion and Happiness: Much Ado About Nothing.”

He noted frequent media ballyhooing of studies purporting to show religion makes people happier. But such studies are typically deeply flawed. Usually examining only America – a weird country, disproportionately religious, and hyper-individualistic, compared to other advanced nations. And even within America, the studies are often unrepresentative, surveying limited population segments. There’s also the eternal conundrum of correlation versus causation. (Cragun suggested the “gold standard” would be a controlled experiment, unlikely to happen.) But the biggest problem with these studies is disregarding the size of any effects reported.

Cragun countered those studies with one of his own, based on a 2010-14 “World Values Survey” of 60 countries. Correlating self-reported happiness ratings with three variables: asking (1) are you religious? (2) how important is God in your life? And (3) how often do you attend religious services? (People often lie about the latter.)

A recap of the results: in only a handful of the 60 countries were there any statistically significant correlations between happiness and the three questions. (Statistical significance meaning only that a result is unlikely due to mere chance.) However, in all such instances, the size of the effect was so tiny as to be meaningless. (The U.S. showed the highest effects, but even here, tiny.)

Based on these results, Cragun commented that “no therapist should recommend religion as a treatment for depression.”

Meantime, he was also critical of other reported correlation studies for lacking a theory to explain why religion should confer happiness. Actually, there are some conventional ideas in this regard – like the comfort of an afterlife belief. But Cragun cited Phil Zuckerman’s book Society Without God, indicating that religious people actually fear death more than the non-religious, feeling uncertain about their fates and afraid of Hell. Whereas atheists feel sure death is an end, and tend to be accepting of it.

Cragun also cited a famous, well-funded study of heart surgery outcomes when people prayed for the patients. Confounding the expectations of the study’s sponsors, those patients were more likely to die. Apparently being told of the prayers made them more fearful.

There’s also the idea of comfort at the thought that a paternalistic God is watching over you. But here again that’s a double-edged sword. Another source of anxiety, thinking you have no privacy from a judgmental deity. Believing God is always watching you can induce neuroticism.

To the extent there actually is any happiness benefit from religion, it probably has nothing to do with the beliefs, but rather the social connections involved with being part of a congregation. But Cragun pointed out that, of course, one doesn’t have to go to church to have nourishing friendships.

George Hrab is a musician and podcaster. His presentation was aptly titled “Never Trust an Ocelot to Parallel Park.” Certainly a subject that’s been getting a lot discussion lately. But he called this a “brain sorbet” – a sequence of discrete word things (in which “jury tampering” came up with bizarre frequency):

1. The “misconception song.” What you think you know is often wrong; containing numerous examples of common things like Edison inventing the light bulb (actually, he merely improved it).
2. The “Who” thing. Referring to the band; particularly the line in one song saying “I hope I die before I get old.” Sung by Roger Daltrey at 21. Hrab wondered what he was thinking then – and when he still was singing the song at 73.
3. A long parody of the Biblical “begats,” filled with very very silly names.
4. “Picky eater.” Focusing on the meaning of the word “savory.” (Don’t ask). Hrab was a “lugubriously finicky” eater as a kid, hating everything.
5. “Too many crosses” – detailing all the varieties of crucifixion practiced by the Romans, opining that Easter is the lamest of holidays, and ending up, somehow, at Valentine’s Day.
6. Poetry is easy. (This was introduced with a nod to irony.) Particularly easy is non-rhyming poetry, one of four poetry categories Hrab posited. The last category was Limericks, which usually end with a reference to genitalia (such as a word rhyming with Limerick).
7. Starting with reference to a CD purchased from Amazon, Hrab kind of rehearsed his own history with music, with particular emphasis on “West Side Story.”
8. “I am Molar Ram.” At least that’s what it sounded like Hrab said, he was talking fast. This was about his experience re-viewing “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” deeming it the best of all prequels, explaining how Jones is the way he is. But viewing it for an umpteenth time, Hrab broke down bawling. Because he’s full of unrealized love, and it’s killing him. So what does he do? Shtick like he did here. His whole life. Avoiding rejection – “the real me is unnervingly unworthy of love.” Yet he nevertheless feels “unmitigated exultation at the possibilities of existence.”

Don’t we all?

Joseph Uscinski is a political science professor at the University of Miami, author of Conspiracy Theories – a Primer.

Conspiracy theories (CTs) have gotten much attention lately; we’re said to be in a “golden age” of them.

The pandemic fueled it, with proliferating CTs about its origins, treatments, vaccines, etc. Trump and Trumpism have played a big role too.

About 70% of Americans believe CTs are out of control. Much blame is cast upon social media, especially Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg thus a prime villain.

Uscinski avowed that CTs are not a good thing: promoting dubious ideas, scapegoating, “non-normative” behavior (ranging from vaccine refusal to violence), and even ill-advised government action responsive to CT believers. But trying to regulate this has downsides: decreased free speech, innovation, and choices. There’s no good way to determine what’s legitimate advocacy.

He posited that it’s actually not (false) information as such that drives CT beliefs, but who we are leads us to toward certain kinds of information in the first place. “Anti-social people seek out anti-social ideas and act in anti-social ways.” Nobody falls into that by accident. We have predispositions and group attachments; we want to think like others like us. There’s the question of who we trust, or not; declining trust in societal institutions – like mainstream news media – loosens our grip on truth and reality. Exploited by political actors.

A recurring theme in his talk is how difficult it is to change anyone’s dearly held beliefs. People latch onto anything that meshes with their pre-existing frameworks, and shun anything discordant. [This is called confirmation bias – FSR]

Uscinski reviewed three specific CT cases, with reference to polling he’s overseen. First, the JFK assassination. Initially, JFK CTs were believed by about 50%, rising to around 80%. But that was actually before the internet and social media kicked in. And when they did, belief slid back down to little over 50% today.

Secondly there was the plethora of Covid CTs, with belief steady at around 30% and not rising. And third, QAnon – believing Trump is in a secret war against a deep state of baby-eating pedophilic Satanists (yes). For all the concern about QAnon, Uscinski found supporters holding at just around 5%.

Then he looked at two more recent cases. A new panic about supposed sexual “grooming” of children in schools; and the “great replacement theory” positing that elites are working to swap out whites for more pliable brown-skinned newcomers. He found belief in both these CTs in the 20-30+ percent range.

It might be noted that these CTs seem largely to be a thing of the political right. And it was brought up in the question period that such beliefs seem to correlate with religious faith. [CT believers, religious believers, and Trump supporters, are pretty much the same people. Perhaps belief in a supreme being makes the brain vulnerable to other crazy stuff – FSR.]

Uscinski also studied 37 additional CTs, and belief levels over time. He found they’d increased in 6 cases, decreased in 15, and held steady in 16. His bottom line from all this: it’s just not true that CT belief is a growing problem; and there’s little evidence of social media contributing. He situated that idea in a long line of tech panics, dating back centuries. One might say the notion of social media driving CTs is itself a CT.

But he opined that, in the big picture, people are actually getting smarter. So he ended by posing the question, is the CT problem really worse than ever? – and answered it by saying, worse than when we were burning witches?

J. Anderson Thomson is a psychiatrist who spoke about his book, Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith.

Everyone knows religion reflects trying to explain what we don’t understand; to gain a moral touchstone; to combat fears of death. All more or less conscious mental phenomena. But Thomson went deeper.

He began by twice quoting Jefferson in 1816, on how religious dogmas (as distinct from moral principles) have forever induced people to battle and torture each other over abstractions actually beyond the comprehension of any human mind. Charles Darwin was then nine, and would go on to supply the understanding of our origins equipping us to rise above Jefferson’s lament.

The evolutionary process he demystified reveals us to be, at the most fundamental level, “problem solving devices” aimed at gene replication. One’s own individual well-being and survival is just a means to that end. This is Richard Dawkins’s “selfish gene” paradigm. Really ultimately just math – traits enhancing an organism’s likelihood of reproducing will proliferate in subsequent generations, carrying along the genes associated with them. In service to this our brains evolved – mostly performing functions not even in conscious awareness.

Thomson spoke of junk food and pornography as “super-normal stimuli” outclassing ones we encounter naturally, hijacking the brain to cause behaviors responsive to very deep-seated desires whose true evolutionary purpose is not to reward us but to get our genes into the next generation. Religion does similar.

It takes advantage of a key human evolutionary adaptation, “eusociality” – described by Thomson as “colony life” or an endless camping trip with close relatives. Religion meshes helpfully with this by enabling expansion beyond just family groups into larger (and thus stronger) social collectives.

He also stressed the salience of parent-child relationships, and how religion gains a foothold in our minds by mirroring that. Especially the mother-child bond. Belief in a deity mirrors knowledge of a mother’s existence, actually filling roles akin to a god’s. Mothers answer prayers; they’re seen as omniscient and omnipotent. A loving presence in challenging circumstances. They provide sustenance. Thomson placed the Christian communion sacrament in this context (though without specifically mentioning breast milk).

Another key theme is that religions ask us to suspend disbelief only within limited bounds – we’re set up with alarms against gross violations of the natural order, but religions tend to entail only modest tweaks to our understandings of how things work.

He also discussed ritual, especially “rhythmic physical activity” like dancing and even just touching. Affecting us on a deep subconscious level by boosting endorphin levels, thus raising pain thresholds and promoting interpersonal bonding. Mirror neurons come into play. Yet another deep mechanism religion exploits, with even nonbelievers finding it hard to resist an emotional response.

This put me in mind of my own experience. I was that rare child who never absorbed an iota of religious belief. I was also socially very laggard. Thomson’s presentation made me wonder whether those two things were connected. Seventy years later I still feel I lack some standard social genes; and my non-religiosity remains absolute. Yet I’m not entirely without human social response. I’ve noticed a deep susceptibility to smiles. Seeing one provokes a warm feeling. Even if on the face of, like, a Putin, or a Trump! I find I must engage my rational brain to countermand that innate human response.

This is ultimately what Thomson was urging us all to do when it comes to religion.