The illusion of balance

I got an interesting email, undoubtedly prompted by one of my recent anti-Trump posts.  Here's the salient part:

People like you calling yourself skeptics make me laugh.  One look at what you write and anyone can see you're biased.  You're constantly going on about left-wing liberal crap, and calling ideas you don't like words like nonsense and stupid and ridiculous.  You don't even give the opposite side a fair hearing.  You dismiss stuff without even giving it good consideration, and call it "skepticism."  At least you could be honest enough to admit you're not fair and unbiased.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's start with the easy stuff first.  

I'm not unbiased, and have never claimed I am, for the very good reason that everyone is biased.  No exceptions.  

Skepticism doesn't mean eliminating all biases -- that's almost certainly impossible.  As British science historian James Burke points out, in his mindblowing series The Day the Universe Changed, the whole enterprise of knowledge is biased right down to its roots, because your preconceived notions about how the world works will determine what tools you use to study it, how you will analyze the data once you've got it, and even what you consider to be reliable evidence.

So sure, as skeptics we should try to expunge all the biases we can, and for the rest, keep them well in mind.  A bias can't hurt you if it's right in front of your eyes.  As an example, my post yesterday -- about a claim that Breakthrough Listen has found incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence -- revealed my clear bias to doubt the person who made the claim.  However, the important thing is that (1) I stated it up front, and (2) at the end of the post, I admitted explicitly that I could be wrong.  (And in this case, would be thrilled if I were.)  In the end, the evidence decides the outcome.  If the aliens have been talking to us, I'll have no choice but to admit that my bias led me astray, and to change my mind.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What the guy who emailed me seems to want, though, is always to have some sort of "fair hearing" for the talking points of the other side(s).  Which in some cases is a reasonable request, I suppose, but we need to make sure we understand what "fair and balanced" means.  In the realm of science, it's not "fair and balanced" to have a geology textbook give equal time to plate tectonics and the claim of somebody who thinks the mantle of the Earth is filled with banana pudding.  There are some ideas that can be dismissed out of hand, based on the available evidence; young-Earth creationism, alchemy, homeopathy, and the geocentric model are obvious examples.

There's more to it than this, though, because he touched on the subject of politics, which for a lot of people skates out over very thin ice.  And sure, here as well I have my biases, but I'm perfectly open about them.  I do lean left; no question about it.  I hope I don't do so thoughtlessly, and with no chance of having my mind changed if I'm wrong, but I've been a liberal all my life and probably always will be.

But my attempting to be fair doesn't mean I'm any more required to give credence to absurd or dangerous ideas in politics than I am in any other realm.  "Balance" doesn't mean pretending that people promoting democracy and those promoting fascism are morally equivalent.  It doesn't mean we should give equal weight to >99.5% of climatologists and to the <0.5% who think that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening.  It doesn't mean we have to give the same respect to those campaigning for equal rights and those who think that people of other races are inferior or that queer people should be lined up and shot.

So okay, we should listen to both sides.  And then give our support to the one that is moral, just, and in line with the facts and evidence.

In summary, I'm obligated to treat all humans with equal respect, but that doesn't mean all ideas are worthy of equal respect.  You may not like it, but sometimes the fair, balanced, appropriate, and -- dare I say it -- skeptical response is to say, "That idea is wrong/immoral/dangerous/flat-out idiotic."

In any case, I'm not going to apologize for my biases, although I will try to keep my eyes on them at all times.  And if knowing that I'm (1) liberal, (2) understand and trust science, (3) support democracy and human rights, and (4) champion LGBTQ+ people ('cuz I am one) bothers you, you're not going to have much fun while visiting my blog. 

But after all this -- well, if you really do get your jollies from reading stuff that pisses you off, then knock yourself out.  

****************************************

Moral relativity

Once you accept a given non-evidence-based belief system, be it homeopathy or fundamentalist Islam, I see why that would require you to disbelieve in certain realms of scientific understanding.  If you are embracing something based on faith, and it comes into conflict with rationality, one or the other has to go.  It's time to surgically remove the source of the conflict.

I do, however, find it curious how selective the surgery can be.  The same people who object to biological science's understanding of evolution are frequently the same ones who are perfectly willing to take medicines and undergo medical procedures, all of which were developed by the same scientific framework that generated the theory of evolution.  It's a little hard to see how science can be so far right in one way, and then lead you so far wrong in another.

Be that as it may, I do get why the jettisoning of fact-based science happens.  But sometimes the specific bits that get rejected are a little hard to fathom.

Most of you have probably heard of Conservapedia, the crowd-sourced wiki project begun in 2005 by Andrew Schlafly to counter the "liberal bias" he found in Wikipedia.  His idea was that everything in the project would be written and supported from conservative and Christian ideals.  As a result, the page on Barack Obama is entirely negative; the page on climate change states that, basically, it isn't happening; the page on Jesus unquestioningly accepts his divinity; and so on.

All in the name of "eliminating bias."  Oh, and did I mention that its motto is, "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia?"

But so far, none of this is all that surprising.  It's hardly to be marveled at that conservative Christians embrace conservative Christian viewpoints.  But I just stumbled a couple of days ago onto two pages on Conservapedia that really, truly, mystified me.

Because apparently they find the Theory of Relativity, and Einstein's mass/energy equivalency formula (E=mc²) to be "liberal claptrap."  (Direct quote from the page on E=mc².)

And I'm thinking, "Okay.  I can see rejecting evolution, cosmology, and plate tectonics, because all of those strongly support the antiquity of the Earth.  But what in the hell is the problem with Einstein?  All that Einstein has done is to show that matter and energy can be converted back and forth, and how objects behave when they are traveling at a high rate of speed."  Neither one, I would think, would be first on the list of Theories Conservatives Shouldn't Like.

Apparently they are, though.  The Conservapedia folks go to great lengths to say how both of them are suspect, that any "dissenting views" by scientists who doubt Einstein are "suppressed as heresy," and how neither relativity nor E=mc² has ever been experimentally verified (in fact, they state in several places on the page for the Theory of Relativity that it has been "rejected," "is not entirely successful or proven," and contains "clear contradictions").

Amusingly, on the page for E=mc², they then follow up this criticism with a bunch of evidence that completely supports its validity, and state outright that in an experiment done all the way back in 1932, mass/energy equivalency was supported to an accuracy of ±0.5%.  I guess that's not enough to count as "verification," for some reason.

Only at the end of the page on the Theory of Relativity do we get an inkling of what is going on here.  Einstein's ideas, they say, promote moral relativism:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic President Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion.  As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.  Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common.  Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.

So, yeah.  A mathematical system describing how matter behaves at extremely high speeds has anything to do with abortion law.

In any case, I decided to do a little digging, and find out what they hell they could possibly be talking about regarding the Tribe article showing that the General Theory of Relativity was pro-choice.  And I found the source; a paper from the Harvard Law Review in 1989 called "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics," in which Tribe used Relativity as a metaphor:

The Roe v. Wade opinion ignored the way in which laws regulating pregnant women may shape the entire pattern of relationships among men, women, and children. It conceptualized abortion not in terms of the intensely public question of the subordination of women to men through the exploitation of pregnancy, but in terms of the purportedly private question of how women might make intimately personal decisions about their bodies and their lives. That vision described a part of the truth, but only what might be called the Newtonian part. ... [A] change in the surrounding legal setting can constitute state action that most threatens the sphere of personal choice. And it is a 'curved space' perspective on how law operates that leads one to focus less on the visible lines of legal force and more on how those lines are bent and directed by the law's geometry.

So, now I'm thinking, are you people just idiots?  Or what?  When conservatives branded Bill Clinton with the nickname "the Teflon president," did you throw away all of your non-stick cookware?  Do you think that a "puppet government" is run by Pinocchio, Charlie McCarthy, and Howdy Doody?  When reporters call North Korea "the Hermit Kingdom," does that mean that we should immediately round up and imprison all of the hermits?  Or possibly hermit crabs?

Do you think that rainbows literally taste like Skittles?

You know, in this blog I've deliberately taken up the cause of clear thinking, and tried to do battle with those who promote ridiculous ideas and pretzel logic.  But sometimes, honestly, the muddy water seems to run too deep.  If you are that delusional, that much of a blithering moron, I just don't know that there's anything I, or anyone else, can do about it.

Einstein showed that morals are relative.  I mean.