The New Atheist

Think atheists are arrogant and unwilling to admit mistakes? Not so: http://bit.ly/9KCCoq

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Surviving the World –
Lesson #579 – Blasphemy http://bit.ly/c1KhWa

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Andreas Moritz Cancer Cures Quack – Skeptico http://bit.ly/dwKs2Q

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50 Most Awesome Atheists of all time http://bit.ly/9fZujY

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I have always loved science. From when I was young I was always fascinated by everything – put everything terrestrial under my 10x microscope, looked at everything celestial through my telescope, made up chemistry experiments from books on kitchen chemistry and experimenting with electronics. I learned to love learning, and started reading non-fiction very young, and started reading beyond my years. I read Was Einstein Right at 12 or 13 on a family trip, and then began reading all I could on quantum and astro physics. And understood some of it. By 16 I had probably read much of the literature available in the public library on both subjects, and started branching in to chaos theory, geology and biology Never wanted to be a scientist per se, but always loved learning and reading on a variety of science topics.

For some odd reason today, a thought popped in to my head – why am I so passionate about scientific inquiry? This is a critical piece of my world view and the scientific method is, for me, a basic component day to day decision making. So I started thinking about it, and came up with a few things.

First, I’ve come to realize this naturalistic, scientific method type thinking creates a barrier with the religious. We speak different languages. For example, with science, the term “theory” is a good thing – something to be tested and supported by evidence and continually challenged. For the religious, the term “theory” is something completely unsupported, unproven and made up. Unless something unsupported, unproven and made up is in a “holy book” at which point it is absolute truth. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying to get those folks to appreciate logic – and it doesn’t mean they aren’t going to stop trying me to accept ridiculous arguments. The problem is that religious folks think faith without evidence is a good thing, are even proud of it. Sometimes to the point they feel faith in the face of evidence contrary to their view is good. And I can’t fathom that. Which leads me to my second thought.

Science isn’t about having the answers, it is about seeking the answers. Good scientists, when faced with strong evidence, will change their stance. That is sort of the point of science – when a better hypothesis comes along, with good evidence, that new theory becomes the current standard to be challenged by new hypotheses and observations. Newton came up with a theory of gravity, and it was pretty good based on what could be observed. Then Einstein came along and showed Newton’s theory wasn’t complete. Science is OK with that, religion isn’t. Just as the religious were getting the hang of Newtonian physics, we threw them a curve and now space and time are no longer longer absolute.

Third, and this is my favorite bit about science – it does not claim to be right. The whole point, all these great minds and thinkers and time and energy, working toward _disproving_ hypotheses just as much as proving them. Sure, people are disappointed when new evidence doesn’t support their theory – but I’ve read too many articles and papers – scientists become excited by new evidence that can contribute to a new theory! Every time a hypothesis is destroyed by evidence, dozens of new theories rise up to be tested and tried and reviewed. This doesn’t happen in religion. With religion, all evidence must be suppressed; it is too threatening. With religion there is no opportunity to change direction without completely losing face (although they seem to find ways to squirm out sometimes).

Science is all about getting closer and closer to the truth – based on evidence. Constant learning. Willingness to accept “we don’t know yet” as an answer – and then coming up with an experiment to get closer to an answer. Building upon previous learning to enhance future learning. This inquisitiveness, excitement, and willingness to question is what I really love about Science.

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I haven’t been blogging for a while, mostly because Twitter has been such a great place to share quick thoughts, but there are a few things on the health care debate I wanted to share in more than 140 characters. The Twitter items also post here, and I will turn that off if anyone asks.

Anyway, the health care issue has been rather significant lately, and this new group of folks who call themselves “teabaggers” because they apparently don’t appreciate the origin of the term, as I’m sure they wouldn’t approve of such a practice.

So, on to the real content.

Check out the below video of Al Franken conversing with his constituents at the MN State Fair (HT Cynical-C)

Around the 3:00 minute mark, Franken makes an interesting comment about how health care is current paid for, and expands on the idea for a good part of the rest of the exchange. In short, health care is already paid for by the tax payers, through emergency room prices, insurance premiums and Medicare/Medicaid. What Franken proposes is essentially a reallocation of funds through legislation and regulation.

I am generally not a fan of more government oversight and regulation, it tends to be wasteful and inefficient. But in this case, Franken seems to have a good point – if we change how we’re paying for these costs, and pay for lower costs items such as preventative care, rather than emergency care, we can get more done with the same amount of money or less (economists call this Pareto efficiency). At the same time we can address what amounts to fraud in the Medicare system today, which is costing the government (and therefore tax payers, don’t forget) quite a lot of money, and is due mostly to poorly aligned incentives (in my opinion).

The video is worth a careful watch, and Fraken shows himself as a thoughtful person, I think if more politicians were willing to engage in such a honest communication, we could have a better opinion of politicians. Personally, I believe the health care debate is being horribly over simplified by both sides of the media; the issues, costs and benefits are being obscured.

I do not have an answer on how to fix health care, and as much as I dislike the “nanny state” the US seems to have become, it seems despicable that we would find it acceptable to spend more taxpayer funds, while allowing people to suffer by denying preventative care in deference to costly (and often painful) emergency room care. It seems the conservatives value human life so much they are happy to spend money to save it from almost dying, but not spend money to prevent it from almost dying. This is, of course, unless it is a life convicted of a crime, in which case it is perfectly rational to put an end to that life they felt so sacred when it was a fetus.

So let’s think about it, what would be rational for health care? Again, I don’t have any answers, but a few thoughts:

• Focus on the costs of results – if $25 in cost can prevent $100 in care later 50% of the time, it is probably a good investment. Private insurance has proved this out with things like Lasik surgery, smoking cessation and weight loss
• The government is lousy at evaluating risk – there are too many interests involved, again pointing toward a stronger role for markets rather than legislation
• Government can create a regulatory atmosphere which provides incentives to health care providers and patients to minimize the costs of services (i.e. avoiding needless procedures suggested by doctors, avoiding needless visits by patients).

Again, I am by no means an expert in this space, but I think Franken brings up some pretty good points, and admits it is not an easy problem to solve, which is respectable, it isn’t.

What do you think?

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It occurs to me that most people find it strange that I am working on Christmas Eve (and working late at that) and don’t really treat Thursday as a particularly different day, I’ll still be working and getting more done that usual without the usual flood of meetings.

I’m curious though, do other atheists/humansists/Brights/etc do anything with the free day off? I think I’ll try to have some spaghetti, but that’s about the extent of my celebration. Of course the extended family will be miffed about the lack of observance, but for me, the Xmas holiday was always more stressfull than fun, so declining to celebrate is a relief.

What are other’s experiences with celebrating/non-celebrating. Of course we know that Xmas is just a replacement for pagan holidays, and so forth (I prefer to celebrate winter solstice, but for no particular reason). So, thoughts, comments?

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Hello again world – it has been a while. Due to a variety of factors, including a rather greuling work schedule, this blog has been silent for far too long. One of the side effects of this the WordpPress installation powering this site getting grossly out of date. This became apparent when I received an email from Google alerting me to potentially dangerous content on the server. After my (less than professional) forensic investigation, it appears a weakness in an old version of WordPress was exploited to upload some internet gambling related content to the site. It does not appear anyone was negatively impacted, though for a time Google and FireFox alerted visitors to potentially dangerous content.

So, the moral of the story is, I need to make a little time, at least every week or two, to log in, make sure WordPress is up to date, and post something interesting/insightful/useful/amusing, and I’ll try to make a point of doing so – probably beginning in mid to late September There are a lot of other tasks to get things back up to speed, and those will happen over the next 6 to 8 weeks, making this a (hopefully) more interesting place to stop on the intarwebs.

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