Oh, Grow Up, You Bickering Idiots!

Over the weekend, I posted an entry about some of my fellow atheists taking stances that I thought were A) stupid, and B) counter-productive. Well, here comes a story (also here) of both the non-religious and the religious being extraordinarily inept in their handling of a dispute.

So, this guy is called to appear in the local courthouse. The courthouse has church pews, complete with crosses, as their seats. Not the most appropriate thing, admittedly, but the reason why they are there is because the city had bought an old church building to turn it into a community center, and rather than have to buy new benches for the courthouse, they decided to recycle the pews from the church and use them. So, ya' know, that makes sense, and while I might be a mite bit grumbly, it doesn't seem like too big a deal to me*.

Not so the defendant (a self-described agnostic), who is now suing. Which is really pretty counter-productive, especially considering that the benches are in place because of a move that was intended to save the county money and not to proselytize. Inappropriate...yeah, basically, but intentional conversion tool? Probably not.

So, I'm more-or-less on the side of the local government up to this point. Should they do something to remove the crosses? Yeah, but it's not an emergency and they can do it as budget allows.

And then the mayor gets involved. Rather than pass the defendant-turned-plaintiff off for the over-reacting yutz that he is, the mayor declares this to be part of some sort of non-existent persecution of Christians:

Maybe it’s time the religious right stands up to the liberal left and says enough is enough. Where do you stop? Where’s the common sense? I’m not taking them out.

So, one idiot decides to sue over something that probably isn't too big a deal. And the response of the city government? To declare legal jihad against the evil Satanic "Liberal Left"! So, apparently the mayor believes that the correct response to someone else's childish behavior is to be even more childish.

Ahhh, false dichotomies, straw men, and delusion from all sides, with a dash of identity politics added for flavor. The logical fallacy parade continues!

Did I mention lately that we're doomed? Yep, we are, indeed.




*However, I suspect that many of the folks who blow this particular incident off as not a big deal aren't quite on the same boat as I am here. Basically, if the symbol had been Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, Zoroastrian, Jain, Richard Dawkin's "atheist A", etc. etc. I would be having more or less the same reaction - the symbol is not appropriate in a court room, but there are bigger things to worry about. My experience has been that many people think that it's not a big deal when their religion's symbols are displayed, but if it were another religion's symbols, well, then it would be unacceptable!

So, here's the test, ask yourself honestly if you would brush this off if it were a symbol from another group, including groups who think that you are wrong and sinful. If you'd still think it wasn't such a problem, then we are on the same page. If you would think that it was a problem, then you really need to get the beam out of your own eye before you go looking into other people's motes, and you shouldn't assume that I am going to agree with you on any other issues...

Good Article...Bad Illustration

I just read an article on NBC Los Angeles' web site about attempting to persuade more women to enter science and engineering fields. It deals primarily with the observation that women routinely prove the same aptitudes as men in these fields, but choose not to go into them for social reasons. More specifically, the way that science and math are taught in schools gives a distorted view of what they are really about, and teenage girls are often exposed to a variety of social and personal pressures that cause them to reject science and engineering as fields for "weird boys."

The article is a good one, and might give the parents of girls something to think about. However, there is one point in the article where one of the people advocating for more women to become involved in engineering makes a curious statement. She is speaking about the lack of role models for women int he sciences, and says of her niece:

While Lamoreaux’s niece acknowledged the designers who did things like design apps for her iPhone were creative, she didn’t see any female role models. Her niece was able to name five favorite female authors but couldn’t name five female CIOs (Chief Information Officer).

I can't name five female CIOs either. Of course, I also can't name five male CIOs. I can, however, name five male authors, as well as five female authors. The simple fact of the matter is that, unless you are a business insider, you are unlikely to bother learning the names of CIOs of different companies. If you are a reader, however, you are very likely to learn the names of authors who produce work that you like. Comparing the knowledge of author's names to CIO's names is comparing apples and oranges.

The basic thrust of her argument is a good one - that there are more male than female role-models publicly visible in science, and that changing that might change the face of the science workforce. However, this particular way of illustrating that point just seems odd and counter-productive. To be fair, she was being interviewed and had to think on her feet, but it is a useful example to use when honing one's own debate skills. Never use an example that, upon reflection, doesn't actually support your point.

At any rate, read the article, it's a good'un.

We're Doomed

I believe that we're doomed.

Because we are a bunch of idiots.

Actually, no, not idiots, we are capable of making good decisions, we just decide not to.

Because we'd rather be misinformed than to know what's really going on in the world.

The terms for the condition are variable. Some call if mass delusion, some call it widespread scientific (and hence reality) illiteracy, others call it any number of less pleasant names.

But, the end result is that we are probably doomed.

So, what am I talking about?

In the last week, I have been bombarded on all sides by people making delusional claims about a wide variety of things, all of which have one linking element: if the person holding the claims was more concerned with the truth than with simply reinforcing their own assumptions, they wouldn't believe that the claim had any validity.

A few examples are, perhaps, in order.

For starters, there is the fact that Andrew Wakefield, who published a flimsy study while having not one but two financial incentives for claiming that the MMR vaccine was dangerous is now being lionized as a martyr by the anti-vax community because he has finally begun to be held responsible for starting a needless scare by lying in a published paper for his own financial benefit.

Then there's the people for whom everything is best explained by a vast conspiracy. The World Trade Center? Government conspiracy. The person that you like lost the election? Clearly an election conspiracy. No weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq? Media conspiracy. People in positions of power routinely come from particular places? Couldn't possibly be a pattern of power distribution common throughout human history, it must be a vast, world-wide conspiracy. Science shows homeopathy (which is not synonymous with naturopathy, despite what many homeopaths like to claim and many people believe) to be nothing but an ill-founded notion that violates the laws of physics and is perpetuated to earn money for homeopaths? Big pharma conspiracy.

There really have been conspiracies. 9-11 was a conspiracy amongst religious extremists in the middle east. Watergate was a conspiracy in Washington. And numerous smaller conspiracies happen all of the time. But none of them ever manage to reach the level fantasized about by anyone with internet access.

There's the constant stream of people who keep claiming that the climate is in fact in perfectly normal condition, and as evidence they cite non-facts and make statements clearly indicating that they haven't actually bothered to find out what the sources of data are (for the record, as an archaeologist, I am familiar with a lot of sources of climate data that stretch back thousands of years, so if part of your defense is that we only have recent data, then you don't know what the fuck you are talking about!).

How about the journalists at the Atlantic mis-reporting an article from a medical journal that has stirred up anti-vaccine hysteria (especially odd as the medication in question is an anti-viral and not a vaccine)? The fact that this has now been taken up by many right-wing anti-WHO folks as "evidence" of a global conspiracy makes this even more absurd and dangerous.

The regular stream of people who claim that Obama is either a socialist or possessed of demonic powers or both. Okay, if you claim that he is socialist, then you really need to look up what that word actually means, and what his actual policies are. A reality-based assessment will conclude that he's no more socialist than Bush was. If you think he's demonic, then you need to be put on medication.

Then there's the people who, when I point out that their claims about Obama are delusional, claim that I am clearly one of his ideological adherents, because apparently, according to most folks, the world is black-and-white and if you disagree with them then you must disagree with teir opponents. Well, I was annoyed with him before the primaries (as most of the people who actually know my political views are aware). I also am in touch with reality, though, and know that many of the claims made about him (see the above socialist/demonic claims) are completely delusional. If you're going to take issue, there's plenty that he is really doing that you can take issue with, but making idiotic and false claims helps nobody.

On that topic, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, a Green or a Libertarian, a Tea-Party-goer, or a supporter of the Great Green Arkleseizure, your politicians are corrupt, too. Your politicans are lying to you just as much (if not more) than the opposition. Everything that you point to the competition doing? All of it is being done by your side as well. You're not going to clean up politics by getting rid of one guy or one party, you need to radically change the system. And if you are a member of a group who is already claiming that and believes themselves to be squeaky clean...well, pride comes before the fall, my friend.

And then there's the fact that, rather than listen to people who might actually know what they're talking about, many people get their (mis)information about the world from people like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Sean Hannity, Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter etc. etc. etc. Hey, news flash folks, these people all have both agendas to forward and pockets to fill. They may be right sometimes, but the truth is not their primary concern, and if it's profitable to mislead you, then they'll mislead you.



Maybe I'm just grumpy, but I am fucking sick of hearing from people who are more concerned with having their own prejudices and false beliefs reinforced than with solving real problems in the here and now.

That Eerie Feeling That Keeps Me Going

One of the things that keeps me going in archaeology is that occasional shiver down the spine, the feeling that "hey, there's something weird, and a bit creepy here."

I get this feeling whenever I know that I am seeing a piece of the truth of the past, but not being allowed to view the whole thing. It's as if there is something that is being kept from me, that I'm not meant to know, and that makes me want to know it all the more.

The first time I can remember getting this feeling, it was discovering the rising sea levels throughout the Holocene (so, basically, since the end of the last Ice Age). During the early and middle Holocene, sea level rise radically changed the outline of the coasts that we know by submerging large portions of the coastal plains. Many of our bays and lagoons were either river valley or depressions until the encroaching sea covered them in water. The idea that land that was once quite hospitable to our ancestors is now a drowned place visible to humans only with great effort (not to mention equipment)...I can't explain what, precisely, but there is something very eerie to me about this, and something very compelling. Driving on the bridges over the San Francisco Bay, one of these drowned river valleys, still kinda' wigs me out.

I have had these "chill down the spine" moments routinely throughout my career. I have had them numerous times while digging a deep excavation unit within a site and realizing that I am the first person in centuries to see the things that I am seeing.

I have also had the feeling when looking at data and trying to figure out what it means. Recently, I wrote a report on a site where the raw materials were all wrong. Good, local materials were not really used, but imported ones were abundant. There was no practical reason for this that I could determine, so I began to wonder what the social reasons were. Was it just a random occurrence, for whatever reason, the people who occupied this site had a large amount of imported stone and just decided to use it? Were the residents of this site elites, using more valuable materials as a show of conspicuous consumption? Were they outsiders, ostracized by the community and reliant on imported materials (and if so, why didn't they just leave)? What was going on here?

Chill down the spine.

Don't get me wrong. I don't do my analysis by emotion. I can gather data and work out statistics perfectly well, and I rely on solid methodology when I work.

But, still, it's that occasional eerie feeling that I'm finding out something that otherwise would remain hidden from the rest of humanity that keeps me going.

Relax Guys, it's Not Going to Kill You...

There's a post over at Hemant Mehta's blog about a franchise deli where the owner has decided to play Christian music pretty much continuously. A customer complained, and was given a response that indicates that the owner didn't care about the complaint. Mr. Mehta holds that it is not appropriate for the owner to continue to play religious music in a business that caters to the public, and takes the side of the guy who made the complaint.

I normally like Hement Mehta's blog, and usually agree with him, but this is one of two complaints he has made recently where I really think that he's way off base. The other complaint concerns Tim Tebow's religious-themed facepaint, which Mehta also feels is inappropriate.

In the case of the deli, it's a private business. Unless the owner is violating the terms of his franchise contract by playing Christian music (and he apparently is not), there is no real problem with him doing so. By the same token, if I owned a business and I wanted to prominently display atheist books throughout the place, I would be free to do so. The deli owner may lose the business of non-Christians, just as I would likely lose the business of theists, but that's the decision that the business owner is free to make. I get annoyed when I hear religious people complain that a business is "too secular" for them, and this seems no different to me.

In the case of Tebow's makeup, I fail to see why anyone should care. If other members of the team are prohibited from putting non-Christian messages on their faces during games, well, then that is a problem, but I have found no reason to believe that this is the case (if someone can provide solid information indicating otherwise, by all means let me know). Again, when Christians complain about someone having non-Christian messages displayed on themselves, I want to tell them where to stick it, and this is no different.

Here's the deal - I fully agree with Hemant Mehta that the government should not be forwarding a religious agenda, that people acting in their capacity as government employees should not do so, and that religious people need to come to terms with the fact that the non-religious have all of the same rights as them. But this goes both ways, and I fail to see how complaining about the music selection at a sandwich shop or the face of some college kid is going to have any productive results. If Tebow annoys you, that's fine and you're free to say so. If you don't want to go to a sandwich shop because of the musical selections of the owner, that's fine, too (it's even fine to let them know the reason why you won't be their patron anymore). But that's a very different thing from declaring that their actions are inappropriate or unethical.

Edit to Add: This is a case where there is a legitmate problem - the student with a non-religious viewpoint is censored while the religious students are not. However, the face paint and deli music? Not a problem.

Perceptions of the Archaeological Mainstream

There is one fact that keeps coming up in my conversations with people about archaeology, and that is the perception that people who do cultural resource management (CRM) - that is, the sort of consulting work that I do - are perceived as being a small, specialized, and marginalized faction within archaeology. That is, we're not the mainstream, we're the off-shoots.

This perception is understandable when I speak with non-archaeologists. After all, most of the archaeologists who have the time to address the general public via the media are associated with a university or museum, and so it makes sense that most people would simply assume that most or even all archaeologists work in these places.

It is less excusable when I speak with university faculty members, however.

According to a 2001 book by Thomas Neumann and Robert Sanford, the vast majority of member of the Society for American Archaeology are CRM archaeologists. When one considers that most CRM archaeologists never join the SAA (to the best of my knowledge, I am one of six people who works for my company that is a member), it becomes rather clear that, in terms of sheer numbers, university and museum archaeologists are just a tiny sliver of the archaeological community in North America.

However, if you speak with the faculties of many universities, CRM is brushed off as something of a side-bar, a deviation from real archaeology. I once had a conversation with the former editor of American Antiquity, the largest and most respected archaeology journal in the Americas, in which it became clear that he was under the impression that CRM archaeologists were relatively few in number and eclipsed by our university brethren. He was visibly shocked to hear the actual statistics on CRM vs. university employment.

I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. Some university programs have geared themselves towards CRM. For example, Sonoma State University has a Masters Degree program that is geared towards producing CRM professionals, and they are not the only university doing this. Likewise, my advisor at UC Santa Barbara was very familiar with CRM and actively encouraged his students to get experience with it. Nonetheless, university faculties being ignorant of CRM is common in my experience, especially at the large research universities.

The reasons for these perceptions are varied. A small but annoying number of professors turn their noses up at CRM because it is perceived as "too utilitarian" and therefore not worthy of those with lofty goals - a snobbery that is not limited to anthropology professors and is not uncommon at research universities. More often, faculty have heard about the methodological and ethical shortcomings common in early CRM projects - primarily those of the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, but including the CRM scene of the late 1960s through early 1980s, when professional qualifications and standards were still being worked out and best practices still being determines. However, CRM has changed radically since then, as evidenced by the vastly different quality of reports produced and fieldwork done now as opposed to those done as recently as the early 90s. Sometimes this is due to the fact that most of the methodological and theoretical advances within the field come from research institutions, and are then applied in CRM, as as such the folks at the research institutions are disproportionately represented in the journals (which is fine, as that is part of their job). More often, the faculties simply were trained in an environment where their own instructors were unaware of what was going on in the broader field of archaeology outside of the research institutions, and as a result the current faculty is equally unaware.

The end result is that there is one line of work, CRM, in which there are ample jobs and many opportunities, and many students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels are either not being made aware of it, or worse, being discouraged from getting involved.

Things are, of course, changing. Most of the graduate students that I have known, even those intending to go into academics, have done at least some CRM work, sometimes for the experience, sometimes because it is the only work available. As a result, a larger number of the incoming generation of faculty have a solid and realistic knowledge of CRM. However, it is still annoying to run across my colleagues who assume that I am a member of a marginal faction within archaeology when, in fact, they are.

Surface Collection at the Defacatorium

"So, my favorite story involving a defacatorium...well, we were doing fieldwork in Ethiopia..."

...and so began one of the most memorable lectures that I have ever experienced. The instructor, Mark Aldenderfer, is an archaeologist with a deservedly strong reputation. The purpose of this lecture was to describe surface collection strategies for archaeological survey, and the story that best illustrated one such method involved a defacatorium - that is, a place where people go to relieve their bowels. So, the sites surface was covered in human feces (that's shit, for those who dislike the technical terms).

See, this defactorium was on top of an archaeological site. Prior to excavation, Aldenderfer and his crew wanted to get an idea of what types of materials they were likely to find while excavating, and also where some of the artifact concentrations were likely to be located - generally, they wanted to know what the site's internal structure was likely to be. This required doing surface reconnaissance, and it was determined that collecting a sample of material from the surface of the site was the way to go.

The collection method that they decided to employ involved taking a hoop, laying it on the ground, and collecting all of the artifacts on the surface within the hoop. Doing this they would hopefully get a solid sample of the site's constituents while also being able to get an idea of what the sub-surface portion of the site looked like.

The instructions given to the field technicians was that they should place the hoops down at pre-determined spots, pick everything off of the ground, and place it into a bag for sorting at the field laboratory.

...and this was when Dr. Aldenderfer learned that you should always be specific with field technicians - when you say "everything" you should clarify by saying "everything archaeological, leave the rest." When the bags were opened back at the lab and poured out onto the sorting tables, it was discovered that not only had the field technicians collected all of the artifacts, they had also collected chunks of feces that were on the surface.

Luckily, when my field techs screw up in a similar fashion, I only end up with pieces of recent trash. There are perks to working in locations where indoor plumbing is the norm.