2017

Example of creationist conspiracy theorizing

Creationism is a Conspiracy Theory

You can’t be a young-earth creationist without being a conspiracy theorist. When people like Bill Nye take on creationism, they rely on facts and logic. Maybe we should add a conspiracy-theorist angle when we debate creationists. In the States, there are plenty of people who have heard a lot of disinformation about evolution and who don’t know where to stand, but most of them know that they don’t want to be part of any conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists are nut cases.

VP Mike Pence tries to portray creationism as  just another idea about where humans came from, but in reality it’s much more. Creationism rejects science, and with it the body of scientists across the globe who work to advance human knowledge. They say that scientists are not to be trusted to tell the truth about what is good science and what isn’t. According to a creationist, anybody with a middle school education can look at the evidence and know that the world’s scientists are wrong about the history of life on Earth. How could so many scientists be so wrong for so long all over the world? It has to be a conspiracy.

According to creationists, some scientists know that evolution is a lie but spread it anyway, while others are willfully ignorant. It’s not just biology teachers and textbook writers who are in on the conspiracy. It’s anthropologists, archeologists, astronomers, geneticists, geologists, psychologists, and zoologists. The conspiracy includes the whole science community, which should rise up in revolt but instead plays along. It includes everyone with a middle school education or better who looks at the facts and doesn’t see things the way creationists see them. In their book, we’re all dupes or conspirators.

If the science community, as they see it, is a vast conspiracy bent on propagating a devilish lie, what else might scientists be lying about? Climate change? Trump called it a hoax. Vaccines? He said it caused autism. Maybe fluoride in the drinking water? Chemtrails? Morgellon’s? If creationism is true, then the scientific community is a pack of liars, and any of these conspiracy theories could be legitimate. Creationists want to debate by confusing the issue with details, such as the laws of thermodynamics. Let’s look at the big picture: is there a massive, century-old, worldwide conspiracy to lie about science? If that’s the question we’re debating, maybe it will be easier for people to see creationism as the anti-intellectual movement it is.

Mother Love and Human Nature

The three of us in 2006

In college in the 80s, I studied psychology and sociology, and at that time everyone knew that the biological view of human nature was bunk—racist, sexist, reductionist bunk. Thirty years ago, that outlook seemed reasonable, but now it turns out that the biological view has a lot to tell us about ourselves. It’s embarrassing that I was so wrong about human nature, but I have come to embrace the biological view. The biological view says that each person is unique, that variety is built into the human genome, that the brain evolved for behavioral flexibility, and that we humans are the most behaviorally flexible of all animals. The biggest benefit of biological thinking is that it makes better sense of the human experience than the blank-slate view that I learned in college. As a personal example, I submit the love that my late wife had for our daughter. The biological view affirms that mother love is a core component of human nature, while the blank-slate view portrays it as more like victimhood. 

Nothing that a biologist says about human mothers represents anything essentially true about humans as a group or as individuals. Biology is too messy to be essentialist. Nor can biology tell any individual that they must be a mother or should be a mother. When conservatives say that women should stay home and be mothers because it’s natural, that’s not biology talking. Considering the biology of human motherhood doesn’t oppress anyone. It’s the blank-slate view that minimizes the lived experience of most mothers.    

My wife had a hard life, but being a mother to our child brought her joy and a sense of purpose. Her love for our child came from deep within her being. Our daughter, for her part, was more than a passive subject of conditioning. She responded to her mother’s love with complementary instinctive behaviors, completing a positive feedback loop of mother-child communication and bonding. In the 80s studying sociology and psychology, I learned that a mother’s love for her child was something that had been trained into her by the culture’s gender role system. It didn’t spring from deep within and in fact was a tool that the patriarchy used to keep women down. My wife’s love was a conditioned response, they’d say, like thinking of pink as a “girl” color. Love like my wife’s, I was taught, merely feels as though it springs from deep within. That’s what I learned, but biology knows better. In reality, humans make the best mothers on the planet, bar none. Our mammal lineage has been developing mother-and-child instincts for hundreds of millions of years. As mammals go, we apes are exceptionally good mothers, and as apes go we humans are tops. The love my wife felt for our daughter really did spring from deep within her.

The blank-slate view tells women that their deep maternal feelings are actually shallow. The biological view says that a mother’s love for her children is the real deal, a profound element of the human experience.

Honest Debate: Christianity Good and Bad

Moderator, pro-Christianity guy, & anti-Christianity guy

Here’s a video of a recent debate about Christianity, good and bad. I was the moderator, and I think it turned out well. Both debaters are non-believers because this debate is not about atheism versus Christianity. These debates are by and for atheists, created for the atheist community here in Seattle. Each debater represents a different viewpoint, but both viewpoints fit within the atheist worldview. The debate was what we call an “honest” debate. We have specific ground rules, roles, and expectations that prevent problems you see in typical debates: the unfair arguments, evasive answers, and rhetorical tricks. This format is inspired primarily by Rapoport’s rules for criticism, as popularized by Daniel Dennett. With that sort of approach in mind, I’ve been working with the Seattle Atheists to develop dialogs and debates that would facilitate a significantly more meaningful dialog than many of us have come to expect. This “honest” debate on Christianity is the third, and it’s the best. 

Here’s the video.

Sometimes people think that the point of Rapoport’s rules is to be nice. It’s true that the rules have the beneficial effect of taking some of the heat out of a disagreement, but niceness is only half of it. The other half is intellectual honesty. One rule is that you state your opponent’s viewpoint in terms so reasonable that the opponent accepts your paraphrase. Once you’ve done that, you can’t resort to caricature or exaggeration. When you state the opponent’s viewpoint, you demonstrate that you know exactly what you’re disagreeing with. Most people don’t. Over the years, I have seen people have a surprisingly hard time articulating their opponent’s point of view. You see some of this paraphrasing in the Christianity debate, and both debaters are pretty good at it. Before the debate, we had some preliminary discussions, so the debaters were already familiar with each others’ general positions. 

Another of Rapoport’s rules is to find places of agreement. I’ve come to appreciate the power of that technique more and more. This technique also appears in the book Crucial Conversations, about how to de-escalate conflicts and facilitate cooperation among people who are at odds with each other. In this Christianity debate, you see some times when the two debaters find things to agree on. 

The video ends before the results of the polls are announced. By the end of the debate, the pro-Christian side had picked up more undecideds than the anti-Christian side, but the anti-Christian side still had more sympathizers overall. 

The anti-Christian debater is Bob Seidensticker. He’s the author of Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey, and he critiques Christianity on his Patheos blog, also called Cross Examined. Bob had heard of Rapoport’s rules and was eager to participate.

Christianity was our third topic. Our first dialog was on Islam and Islamophobia, and it was not recorded because the topic is too touchy. The second was on Jesus, and you can see it here. We plan to do more.

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Agreeing how to disagree: Here’s a post that lays out the thinking behind better debates. 

Direct dialog on religion: Here’s a moderated video debate where we tried out some of the “honest debate” techniques. 

Kids’ Games and Clades

Air Land Sea is my only perfect game.
Also great for kids.

Most of my adult life, my livelihood has been creating sophisticated games for adults. Some games were artsy, like Over the Edge. Others were commercial endeavors, as when I led the redesign of Dungeons & Dragons and helped revive the sagging brand. At the same time that I was creating commercial games for strangers, I was also creating free games for kids, actually for my daughter as she grew up. These projects were “for fun” games that few people have heard about. It’s something new and exciting for me to do a professional game that’s kid-friendly, and that’s what Clades is. This post describes some of my kid games that, in some way, led up to Clades.

Twenty Guesses

If you play Twenty Questions with kids, you will discover that they would rather make guesses than reframe their guesses as yes-or-no questions. So how do you play Twenty Questions with little children? Turn it into “Twenty Guesses”. Instead of trying to get little kids to form yes-or-no questions, let them do what they want to do and just makes guesses. The trick is in how the grownup with the “secret” answers the guess. The grownup gives one hint about how the guess is “right” and another about how the guess is “wrong”. This structure models abstract categorization for little children, and they get it. Here’s a hypothetical example.

Grownup: OK, I’m thinking of something. [secretly thinking “monkey”] 

Kid 1: Is it a car? 

Grownup: No, like a car, it can move from one place to another, but unlike a car it’s alive. 

Kid 2: Is it a dog? 

Grownup: It is a mammal, like a dog, but it’s not usually kept as a pet. 

Kid 1: A cat! 

Grownup: Remember, people don’t usually have them as pets, but they are furry and they have tails. 

Kid 3: A beaver. 

Grownup: It has hair and a tail like a beaver, but it doesn’t live in the water. It lives in the trees.

Kid 2: A three-toed sloth!

Grownup: Remember, it has a tail, but it does live in the jungle, like a sloth does. It jumps around a lot more than a sloth. 

Kid 3: A monkey! 

Grownup: Right.

For more discussion of this variant on Twenty Questions, see my web page on this game, where I called the game “Guessit”.

Spaceship

A finished game of Spaceship

Little kids love this game because they make real, tactical decisions that help them win most games. Plus they get to draw spaceships, plus they get to scribble all over the grownup’s spaceship. To play, each player draws a spaceship, with weaponry. Then you play in rounds until one player has shot the other player’s spaceship four times. Each round starts with the child rolling a die. The child chooses to keep the die with the number it rolled, or give the die to the grownup. The child physically places the die on the spaceship with the number up. Then the grownup rolls a second die and places it on the other spaceship. If your spaceship has a number at least as big as the other spaceship’s number, you shoot the enemy ship. You can draw an explosion on the enemy spaceship, indicating about 1/4 destruction. A spaceship is destroyed if it’s hit four times. If both players get to 4 at the same time, it’s a draw.

This game is the simplest way I can think of to give a quite small child real tactical choices with instant consequences, good or bad. Spaceship is a little-kid version of Air, Land, and Sea.

For more information, here’s the link to my web page on this game.

Air Land Sea

Update: The end state of an improvised miniatures game that
adapted the Air Land Sea mechanic. This is the 4-year old’s
army. He tied the 10-year old.

This remarkable little work is the only perfect game I’ve ever done. It uses the Spaceship mechanic, except that there are 12 locations to place a die result. Each environment—air, land, or sea—has two locations on each player’s side. Your total value for each environment equals your two numbers multiplied together. You win if, after 12 dice rolls, your total is higher than the other player’s total in two or three environments.  Anyone can start playing with a few seconds’ worth of instruction, and you can complete a match in a minute or two. Even though the game is this simple, it has a distinct beginning phase, middle, and end. Some moves are easy to make, but other rolls give you choices that are painful. I invented this game as a way to teach multiplication, but you can simplify it by switching to addition or even dropping the arithmetic altogether.

For more about this game, here’s my original page about it.

Clever observers might see a resemblance between the three environments in Air Land Sea, the three theaters in Richard Garfield’s Star Wars card game, and the three environments in Clades.

Princess

This simple card game was all about the central question of poker: should I put more money in and vie for the pot, or should I cut my losses and fold? This relates directly to the other important question: are they bluffing? The top card in the custom deck is the Princess, thus the name of the game. This game was not a hit, but even a failed experiment teaches you something. Maybe if I made kids actually bet money, they’d find it more engaging, but I’m not sure that’s a great idea. In creating games for grownups, Rob Heinsoo makes use of a similar tension—to vie for the pot or not—in his grownup games Three Dragon Ante and Night Eternal.

Checkers variants

Checkers is a great game for a grownup and a child to play competitively against each other. Unlike chess, the game plays perfectly well with some of the grownup’s pieces removed. This asymmetry gives the game momentum, in that the grownup starts behind but might pull ahead. Both players can try as hard as they can to win, and the grownup can increase or decrease the child’s advantage just by starting with more or fewer pieces. To keep the game from dragging on, have a player win when they have more queens than the other player has pieces (regular pieces plus crowned pieces). Since I played with my daughter, the crowned pieces were queens, and the uncrowned “men” were princesses.

Here’s my original page on checkers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

For years I’ve puzzled over how one could create an evolution game that has solid science behind it. My answer is Clades. It works by playing to kids’ natural inclination to categorize animals, and it teaches that the way to understand an animal’s place in this world is to understand its evolutionary history. Like many of the games I’ve described here, it works great when grownups play with kids. For example, since most of the cards are face-up on the table, it’s easy for a grownup to help younger players.

In 2016, artist Karen Lewis and I returned to Kickstarter to raise money for Clades, and we raised enough to produce a “dinosaur” version, Clades Prehistoric. You can play the games separately or together. Clades and Clades Prehistoric are available from Atlas Games or (better yet) from your friendly local brick-and-mortar store. 

Clades and Clades Prehistoric available from Atlas Games

2016

YouTube video from 2 years ago

Direct Dialog on Religion

Daniel Dennett has long promoted rules for criticizing honestly instead of insultingly. For example, you should start by stating your opponent’s position clearly, in terms that your opponent would use. This exercise demonstrates that you understand the position you’re about to criticize, not attacking a straw man*. It also sets a tone of exceptional reasonableness. Recently, the idea of “steel manning" seems to be gaining attention, and that’s in the same ballpark as the rules Dennett popularizes. Steel manning means addressing the opponent’s position in its strongest terms. Usually we caricature an opponent’s view without ever realizing we’re doing it. We honestly state our judgments, and we don’t try to caricature anyone else’s view, but the caricature starts in our own heads, so it’s almost impossible to avoid. On the other hand, if you intentionally make a “steel man” argument and address the opponent’s strongest points honestly, you overcome the reflexive tendency to caricature the opponent’s view. Sam Harris has made arduous efforts to communicate across lines of disagreement, and he has suffered some dramatic failures. He’s still trying, and sometimes it works. Two years ago, Dennett’s proposals got me experimenting with formats for disagreeing. Two years ago, I talked two other atheists into joining me online for a video conference where I would debate one of them and the other would moderate. The topic was “how useful is it for us atheists to challenge the religious beliefs of others?” I just reviewed the video, and it holds up surprisingly well. Take a listen if you like. There’s video, but it hardly matters. The action is all in the audio. 

View on Youtube

It’s an amateur performance and recording, for sure. At one point there’s a technical glitch, but soon enough everyone is back in the conversation. None of us are familiar with the format we’re trying, not the Google Hangout nor the moderated discussion. No one’s timing anything, so sometimes our answers go on too long. The performance is uneven. But given all that, it’s an interesting record of our experiment because the conversation is different from a regular debate. We…

• figure out what we agree on, which is as important as what we disagree on.
• take absolute either/or questions and turn them into questions of proportion. 
• state each others’ views fairly.
• clarify where our differences of opinion really lie.
• address each other’s points directly. 

This video is not ready for prime time, but as food for thought it seem worth sharing. 

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* “straw man” and “steel man”: These terms are needlessly gendered. Any chance that introducing “steel manning” is also a chance to change both terms at once? How about “straw dog” and “steel dog”? This switch works for me because men are dogs, but dogs are not men.

2016

Great-Great-200-Million-Times-Great Grandmother Fish

Great Great Grandmothers of Deep Time

How long is 400 million years? How do you get a child to understand that Grandmother Fish lived 400 million years ago? Honestly, that span of time is beyond the comprehension of an adult, let alone a child. So here’s a thought experiment to help little minds and big one appreciate the mind-boggling span of time between the first jawed fish and us. How long would it take you to say Grandmother Fish’s name if you said it out in full with all the “greats” that she deserves? It’s been 200 million generations since Grandmother Fish was alive, so she is our great grandmother with 200 million “greats”. If you said two “greats” per second, it would take you three years to say her full name.

Kids can understand what three years means. They might have siblings that are three years older or younger. They might remember how little they were three years ago, and they might imagine how old they will be in three years. It’s still a long time for a little mind, but it is comprehensible in a way that 400 million years is not. If you really want to drive this home with a kid, have them imagine that somewhere there’s another kid who is just now starting to say Grandmother Fish’s name with all the greats. Then for the next three years, occasionally remind your child that this imaginary kid is still saying Grandmother Fish’s name without a break. Poor kid. You can see why I call her just “Grandmother” Fish. Then three years after you first mentioned it, tell your now-older child that the imaginary kid has finally finished saying Grandmother Fish’s name.

The other value of this exercise is that it drives home an astounding fact. If you went back in time 400 million years and found the earliest jawed fish, they would be the direct-line ancestors of every human on the planet. They would literally be your flesh-and-blood ancestors, your family. The fish you found would also be the ancestors of all land vertebrates, not to mention nearly all fish. What a difference 200 million generations can make!

Here are all five Grandmothers, the number of “greats” in their names, and how long it would take to say the name out lout (at two “greats” per second). These figures are based on estimates from The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, a book that helped me greatly as I worked on Grandmother Fish.

• Grandmother Fish, the earliest jawed fish. 200 million greats. 3 years.
• Grandmother Reptile, the earliest amniotes. 170 million greats. 2.5 years.
• Grandmother Mammal, the earliest eutherians. 120 million greats. 2 years.
• Grandmother Ape, the earliest apes. 1 million greats. 6 days.
• Grandmother Human, the earliest behaviorally modern humans. 4,000 greats. 80 minutes.

The time it takes to say a name corresponds to the number of generations that have passed, not the number of years. Apes have a slower life cycle than our earlier ancestors, so the number of “greats” in Grandmother Ape’s name is relatively small compared to the 30 million years since she lived. 

And if a kid gets excited and wants to try saying one of these names out loud, let them try. See how far they get.

2016

Geek Guys: Dress Up

At Emerald City Comic Con

Next weekend here in Seattle is PAX, the Pacific Northwest’s biggest game convention. Then on October comes Geek Girl Con. My message today is to the straight* guys out there who are going to attend these conventions or other conventions like them. You should dress up. It’s not hard.

When I was a teenage gamer, the idea of dressing up in fantasy clothes was ridiculous. It seemed childish, the sort of thing that even we geeks would criticize as being too geeky. We knew a college guy who played a 21st-level illusionist and who wore a cape to the game. A cape? We rolled our eyes. That’s the conformist 20th century for you. Luckily, modern society is getting over that narrow-minded disdain for costuming, especially in fandom. Costuming has really expanded in the last 10 to 20 years, and it’s a welcome addition to fan culture. Not only does it make conventions more fun, it especially makes the community more female-friendly. That’s an important improvement for a community that sometimes resembles a boys’ club. That’s why my message is for the straight* guys out there.

Dress up.

It doesn’t take much to be better dressed than the average geek guy at a con. Wear a funny hat. Wear a pirate shirt. A T-shirt with fannish joke on it might not be the best way to dress for a con, but if the shirt is clean and so are you, it’s a start. As for me, I’m not the sort to spend any serious time on a costume, so I’m likely to throw on a lab coat. In a lab coat plus a menacing glare, I'm a mad scientist. It’s not much, but that’s my point. It doesn’t take much to participate.

Wearing a costume shows that you’re the right sort of person.

• You put some thought into your appearance. 
• You like fun.
• You’re creative.
• You support costume culture. 
• You’re not a grumpy geek who takes himself too seriously to wear a costume. 

By dressing up, even a little, you help improve fan culture and make it more woman-friendly. Do your part. The bar is set pretty low, so no excuses. 

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* “straight”: In this post, I specify that my advice is for straight geeks. That’s because I have no standing to tell gay men to dress up. Only on a rare, good day do I dress and groom well enough for gay men to mistake me for gay. Male hetero geeks might be the only population to whom I could give any sort of advice about dressing up.