Throwing two cents into a storm.

The Internet is a curious beast. Some stories and arguments quickly ignite, then disappear as quickly as they started. Others seem to be perpetual in that as soon as it seems to have faded away, some newcomer to the scene causes whole histories to replay and flare up again.

Of these two very coarse categories, Elevatorgate definitely belongs to the latter. In many ways, I should like nothing more than to see the whole of the tempest pass by, recovering brain cycles for more important issues. The problem with this attitude, however, is that how we in the skeptical and atheist communities treat women is an important issue. As often as people misunderstand, misrepresent and mistake the issue, at its core, what is at stake in Elevatorgate is whether we want the communities we build to be defined by positive and rational values such as inclusiveness, respect and diversity, or whether we are content to define our movement in terms of a narrow and ill-understood notion of privilege.

Up until now, I've kept my involvement in this debate (or rather, what a debate has since devolved into) to a minimum. I am, after all, a beneficiary of the very privilege under question, being male, and hence have more to learn than to contribute in this particular exchange. (Just to preempt the inevitable, that does not for a moment mean that I am "apologizing" for other men, or that I am asserting that I should take the actions of other men upon myself--- we are all each individuals, are we not?) I am also white, learned English as my native language, and was born into a affluent family in first-world country, etc. My life has hence been one in which doors open to me that are shut in the faces of others, by no virtue of my intellect, my choices or my efforts. Were I to project my own experiences on the world, then, it would thus be all too easy for me to come to the impression that those opportunities that I enjoy are universally enjoyed. When something like Elevatorgate occurs, it should serve as a wake-up call, in that Rebecca Watson was denied a choice I almost certainly would have enjoyed in the same situation: the choice of when and how to disengage from a social event.

As a progressive, as an atheist, as a skeptic, when a wake-up call like that sounds through my social media neighborhood, what can I do but attempt to understand what dynamics of privilege and yes, of misogyny, lead to that failure to respect Watson's independence? Once I start to examine these dynamics, it becomes all too obvious that such failures add to the cost that women must pay in order to participate in communities and movements that I consider to be important. If I take seriously that central value of rationality, self-improvement, then I am led just as inescapably to try to understand how to change the social environment around me so as to prevent this cost being exacted against women in the future.

An alternative approach, however, is to become defensive and to assert that things are fine the way they are. When confronted with contrary evidence, I could have instead dismissed it, and attacked the credibility of those calmly pointing out the cost associated with privilege. I could have even tried to deny the very existence of privilege, instead casting the original incident into a false narrative of "men versus women," of feminism being a thin veil for misandry, or of Watson being a drama-queen (even that term should rankle a few nerves by now!) interested not in reducing the cost of privilege but in inflating her own popularity. Such tactics, however, are fundamentally incompatible with the positive valuation of rationality, as rationality demands entertaining the notion that one is wrong, and as rationality demands a continual effort to improve oneself and to more closely align one's beliefs with reality.

It is in this spirit that I am pleased to note that despite the many men (and even women!) that see no wrong in Elevator Guy's actions, that despite the many people loudly and vilely attacking Watson, there has been a venerable chorus of men and women working hard to shape this incident into a concrete improvement for women in our communities. The fact that this incident has so inflamed passions belies the importance that we place on hashing through disagreements, rather than letting important issues fall by the wayside. Slowly, painfully and fitfully, our communities are improving due to the hard work of activists within our midst. That is something to take solace in, and likewise, is something to encourage the rest of us to join in, even when it can be discomforting.

Notes: Please accept my apology for the lack of links here today. There's simply too many good ones for me to choose a representative set from. Also, a hearty thanks go out to the person that originally suggested the subject for this post, and that introduced me to the concept of "sitting with your discomfort."

All that is sacred.

(adj) sacred (worthy of respect or dedication) "saw motherhood as woman's sacred calling" [WordNet]

Leaving aside the implicit misogyny of the example given, the citation from WordNet for the word "sacred" demonstrates something very important: we can divorce what it means to be sacred from any sort of religious sentiment. Indeed, if we are to leave irrationality behind us, I assert that we must do so. Thus, I'd like to talk a bit about what is sacred to me. That is, what I find to be inherently worthy of respect or dedication.

In that spirit, then, knowledge is sacred to me in ways that nothing else is. Were I to be asked to identify the most quintessentially defining aspect of all that is good about humanity, I would likely respond that our ability to accumulate and record knowledge is what allows us to transcend not only the ignorance into which we are all born, but also the limits of our physical brains. All other human achievements are enabled by our accrual of knowledge in ways that outlast any individual human. At once, the acquisition of knowledge is a highly individual and highly collective pursuit, epitomizing what it means to achieve something of permanence. Towers crumble, words remain.

It is difficult for me to adequately justify my valuation of knowledge as uniquely sacred, as it is fundamental to the person that I've become. As someone that values rationality, however, I must work to increasingly do just that. If this valuation cannot be supported on its own merits, then it is no better than faith and other such anti-virtues. That said, I am in the awkward position that every rational person eventually finds themselves in of not knowing all the answers. Like everything else in my life, this valuation must be amenable to rational analysis, and yet I must have some notions which guide my actions in the interim. Put differently, I must employ some set of heuristics that I use to evaluate both my own choices and those of the society around me. These heuristics must then be refined by learning additional facts and must be discarded to the extent that they contradict reality.

On a more tangential note, I tend to suspect that it is these heuristics that often get confused with religious-minded beliefs, driving the "science is faith" fallacy that I find so detestable. The key difference is that the heuristics adopted by someone that values rationality are recognized as being mere approximations, and thus are malleable to the extent that the underlying reality is not known. Thus, while such heuristics superficially resemble beliefs, they are quite different in practice.

Of course, it's very easy to simply say that something is sacred; a more pressing question for someone dedicated to rationality and materialism is what this assertion implies. A heuristic which does not either directly imply action or imply other values and heuristics which in turn imply action is by hypothesis a vacuous and useless heuristic. Exploring this notion, then, consider what a heuristic of sacred knowledge leads me to aspire to.

Though it is somewhat circular, the first and perhaps most important consequence of this heuristic is the valuation of science, the formalization of the pursuit of knowledge. Disentangling this apparent bit of circular reasoning would take me still further afield, so I will be content to leave it for now with the claim that the sacred-knowledge heuristic and the scientific method are synergistic rather than truly circularly dependent.

Another important consequence of this heuristic is the additional heuristic that knowledge should be shared-- after all, knowledge locked away is knowledge that cannot help in the further pursuit of other knowledge. This is a large part of why the open access and open source movements excite me so, and why I oppose the locking away of human knowledge behind paywalls, military secrecy or other such artificial barriers. Additionally, knowledge kept secret is knowledge that is much more difficult to preserve.

With new approaches to information storage, computation and communication, we are blessed (if you'll forgive the pun and not read too much into it) with new opportunities to safeguard our knowledge against the relentless march of time. To exercise these opportunities, however, archivists must be recognized as a critical part of our societal infrastructure and knowledge must be accessible for preservation.

While I could continue in this vein, I think that this short exploration of the consequences of my sacred-knowledge heuristic is sufficient to demonstrate an essential point: rationality requires rather than precludes the adoption of strong principles to be applied to the world around us, insofar as these principles are derived from sources amenable to rational analysis. We cannot afford for religion to maintain a cultural monopoly on the respect and dedication that underlie the word "sacred," but rather must build our own sacredness in a rational way. All that is sacred, in short, must still lie within the realm of that which can be reasoned about if we are to maintain the primacy of rationality.

The Power of Conversation

Today, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. One of those wonderful, roaming conversations that managed to touch both on the merits of various tabletop roleplaying game systems and on the utility of deriving quantum mechanics from quantum field theory. You know, the kinds of conversations that you can have with awesome people. Along the way, we spent a while discussing a topic near and dear to my blogging interests: science and rationality in society.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we agreed on most of what we talked about with respect to this important topic. Looking back has gotten me thinking about the pragmatic value of keeping the rationality conversation alive, even with like-minded people. There are many reasons that often come up in such meta-discussions, of course. Conversing with others can help you to realize that you aren't alone in everything, just as Darwin fish can serve to raise consciousness about the existence of freethinkers. Such conversations can help one to hone their arguments and develop confidence in their conclusions. Through conversation, we can also expose ourselves to novel motivations and arguments, even for positions we may already take. For the emotional reasons alone, it's worthwhile to keep talking about rationality and science, to say nothing of these kinds of pragmatic benefits.

That said, there's one purpose that conversation can serve that I feel deserves special emphasis. Through conversing with other people, whether like-minded or diverse, we can learn quite a bit about when we are wrong. We are all human (I presume, anyway), and are fallible in our applications of logic. As such, it is a wonderful opportunity for self-improvement to be able to hash through our views with those honestly seeking truth. Indeed, just as science is inherently a self-correcting enterprise that must deal with the limitations of human minds, so too must rationality in general co-exist with a self-awareness of our capacity for mistakes. In conversations with others, we are often called upon to defend, explain or otherwise make explicit those private ideas which shape how we understand the world. When we are in the wrong on an issue, this process can be a tremendously helpful mechanism for self-improvement. Even with like-minded people, one's justifications can be flawed in ways discoverable through open and honest debate.

Conversation, then, is an essential tool in the rationalist's toolbox. Without healthy conversation, we are each isolated and limited to the power of our own brains. This is a large part of why I appreciate having a healthy and vibrant discussion take place on articles that I post here, such as that attached to Context Isn't Everything. By the time that you, dear readers, invest in this nascent community, I am given a precious opportunity to discover the depths of my own wrongness, as well as to find points of agreement with my intelligent, rational and compassionate peers. The rationality conversation is everywhere, and I'm glad for what parts of it find their way here, conveyed by vibrant minds.

The Spock Fallacy

I love Star Trek. I love it quite a lot. (Just ask @masstreble over on Twitter if you don't believe me.) Buried within the Star Trek mythos are quite a lot of different wonderful, positive and utterly human ideals, and so it enjoys a special place in my heart.

It's not all good, though. For as much as Star Trek elevates science and rationality to being the centerpieces of its Utopia, it often cares very little for the actual practice of science. It is also, unfortunately, where we get one of the most quintessential embodiments of the fallacy that rationality must entail emotional detachment. Indeed, many people seem to believe that scientists and others who value rationality are somehow "cold" emotionally (of course, this would make sense if one considers the analogy between irrationality in game theory and the statistical distributions associated with temperature, but I digress). While it is true that many of us embrace our analytical natures and try to deconstruct, analyze and reduce our experiences, that doesn't mean that emotions aren't an important and vital part of that process, to say nothing of our lives on the whole.

We can reason about our emotions, and choose rationally to engage in some action do bring about desired emotional states. For example, I spent money to buy the equipment needed to play video games because I enjoy them, not because it makes sense when emotions are removed from consideration. Practically everyone does this to some degree, but part of being rational, analytical and self-aware is to exercise introspection about this process.

Ironically, I think that much of Star Trek has actually gotten this right, but what sticks in people's minds is the image-- the idea-- of Spock as being both the nearly platonic ideal of a rationalist and of being incredibly unemotional. This image, intended or not, seems to resonate within our culture, leading to that stereotype of the unemotional rationalist being reinforced.

People are, and in my opinion, should be emotional agents in addition to rational agents. The effect, then, of the Spock fallacy, is to create a false dichotomy between these two views of the human condition. Rationality may then be rejected on the basis of not being compatible with intuition or emotion. This is particularly and appallingly clear as applied to religious issues; atheism is often dismissed as lacking in emotional appeal (see Rebecca Watson's recent video on the subject for a good refutation of this argument).

Part of the problem is that in setting up a false dichotomy between rationality and emotion, it is all too easy to forget that rationality is, amongst other things, a strategy for finding the truth. Sometimes the goals of finding truth and being happy appear to be in conflict, and at these times, it is rationality that must win. This is not to say that emotions cannot play a part of such decisions, or that the importance of happiness is somehow overlooked by a rational analysis.

Since I am a physicist by training, I like to argue from limiting cases, and what could be a greater example of the importance of emotion than that of romance? Is it not possible to rationally argue, for instance, that in the interests of long-term happiness, a troubled romance should be ended? This may appear to be in conflict with the importance of emotions, and may even seem to play into the stereotype of rational analysis being "cold." On the other hand, is this not an example of how emotions and rationality can be happily wed?

Rationality and emotion need not be seen as orthogonal to each other, as indeed they are both important parts of being a full and complete human being. Instead of Spock, then, maybe we should think about what Julian Bashir has to teach us.