The Flaw Is In Us

School grades are in the news … again! The phrase that set me off is:”

… a traditional A-F grading system in which the F range is often 50-60 points while all other grade ranges are 10 or fewer points.”

Why people still use this range is mysterious, but of course I have my suspicions. When introducing a new class to my grading system I asked what grade a student would have were she to get two perfect A scores (100/100) and then being dog sick for the third test got a zero, an F. Most students shouted out something sensible (high C, low B) while as usual other shouted out nonsense. If one takes an arithmetical average of 100, 100, and 0 one ends up with an average score of 67. This score qualifies on the “traditional grading scale” as a D, just below the C range. Intuitively, the average of one A and one F should give a C, but with this system two As and one F give a D. Clearly something is wrong.

Obviously I stacked the numbers in this example to expose the flaw. How I “fixed” this basic flaw in the “tradition grading scale” is I took the tale of the Bell curve, off of 50 where it lay, and dragged it over to zero. This gives grade range scores of:
A–100-83
B–82-67
C–66-33
D–33-16
F–15-0

These numbers were arrived at by using standard deviation splits off of the standard Gaussian curve. Students were delirious with joy. I pointed out that in my example (above) the student’s average score would be a B–, which intuitively seems right. But I also told them what the ramifications were. Whereas other teachers scoring an example might look at an answer to an essay questions and see clear evidence of tear drops, might score that a 6/10, whereas I would give it a zero, with maybe a “nice tears” comment (that’s a joke, please do not flame me). My score is an indicator of how far you got to a correct answer using the path you chose. If you chose a long, convoluted path and got half-way down that path, you got a 5/10. If you chose a short route and got half way, you would also get a 5/10. If the two of you compare answers, you might be puzzled as one answer clearly involved more work than the other. But my thinking is that was your decision, not my request. You chose a longer way to answer the question that consumed space and time, but didn’t get you where you needed to go.

I was not an ogre. I modeled what 10/10 answers would be for a great many test questions asked on previous exams. (I also told them I tended to include one of these recycled questions on their exams and the well prepared got a high score as a gift.)

So, why is the flawed, clearly flawed, “traditional grading system” still used? I think at its core is a teacher’s delusion that students learn a sizable fraction of what we try to teach them. (Gosh, to think less is to hint that we aren’t all that good at teaching!) So, to demonstrate “average” learning they needed to get a score of 70-80 percent of the possible correct answers. It is clear from research, however, that that assumption only flatters teacher’s egos as students do not absorb high percentages of what they are taught. And because the system is way over balanced (a score of zero on the first test, needs three perfect scores to get an average, 75, that would give the student a grade of B) teachers make up bullshit rules to hide the flaws. For one, when they are grading you need to leave an answer blank to get a score below 5 or 6 (any drivel will do), leading to students thinking they did better than they actually did in answering such a prompt. If there are multiple quiz scores, some teachers will throw out the lowest score before averaging them, and so on.

The latest “outrage” in this discussion is the assigning of zeros for grades, when the 100 point scale is used. One state is considering a bill outlawing the giving of zeros. Some institutions are suggesting scores of zero be dropped out before average scores are calculated. Obviously these do not address the flaw in the “tradition grading system” of having ten point ranges for As, Bs, Cs, and Ds and a sixty point range for the Fs. A score of less than 50 is actually off of the curve and is meaningless, well, meaninglessly nasty. But what score does a student earn for “no response” or “off topic”? Should those not be scored with zeros?

As usual, these reformers are missing the point, expending energy trying to fix incongruities rather than fixing the system that causes the incongruities. And I think the main motivation is that teachers cannot accept that the average student learns from a third to two thirds of what they are requested to learn, which is what my system is based upon.

A Damned Good Question

In a recent Medium.com post, What Would Happen If a State Banned Insurance Companies?, not labeled “Members Only,” the following question was asked:

This article explores a single provocation: what would happen if a state stopped allowing private companies to stand between people and their medical care? We are talking specifically about medical insurance, not property, auto, life, or any other line. We are talking about the companies that decide whether a doctor’s orders get paid for.

In support of this question, the following was stated:

“The federal government already runs the largest health insurance program in the country. Medicare spent roughly 1.4 percent of its total expenditures on administration in 2016, covering salaries, fraud control, and patient outreach.² Private insurers, by contrast, spend approximately 17 percent of expenditures on overhead, a category that includes marketing, executive compensation, shareholder returns, lobbying, and the elaborate claims-processing infrastructure built to minimize payouts.”

“Between 2022 and 2023, care denials rose an average of 20.2 percent for commercial insurance claims and 55.7 percent for Medicare Advantage claims, driven in part by machine learning tools that automatically reject claims without clinical review.¹ Each of those denials followed the same sequence: a person paid their premium, a doctor ordered care, and the insurance company decided not to pay for it. Somewhere in a corporate office, that decision contributed to a quarterly earnings target. The system worked exactly as designed; the company made money by not doing the thing it charged the patient to do.”

It seems that the only barrier to insurance reform (or elimination) is the lining of politician’s pockets by these insurance companies. They have accumulated the funds to do just that using their current business model, no?

“Insurance companies perform exactly one function that matters: pooling risk. A large group of people pays into a common fund, and when someone gets sick, the fund covers the cost. The concept predates the modern insurance industry by centuries; medieval guilds pooled risk, and so did fraternal organizations. The underlying math requires nothing more than a large enough group of people contributing to a shared pot of money, managed by actuaries who calculate how much goes in and how much comes out. Actuaries work for governments, pension funds, and universities, and they do not need a publicly traded corporation to practice their profession.”

“ … and they do not need a publicly traded corporation to practice their profession.” Indeed!

Confusing the Goal with the Outcome

Various companies are hawking their “artificial intelligences” (AIs) for use and sale. I understand that the goal is to create an intelligence that is artificial, but the marketing arms of these companies are referring to their “AIs” as if they had met that goal already. It is clear that they have not. Artificial intelligences do not yet exist, so we shouldn’t be referring to them as AIs as if they did already exist.

The programs being hawked today aren’t at all close to being intelligent. One foundational researcher refers to them as “pretend intelligences.” They are able to carry on a conversation as if a real person were involved, but they do not understand the concepts and certainly the contexts of the words produced.

When these programs make egregious errors, they are referred to as “AI hallucinations” as that terminology supports the idea that the programs are intelligent already. We are told that large language models are “taught” vast amounts of “knowledge” when they are just given access to vast amounts of data in databases. Please stop referring to them as AIs or their outputs as manifestations of intelligence, otherwise you are just part of the AI hype machine that is selling billions of dollars of … hope … that something will come out of their efforts.

Fine Tuning, My Ass

There is an argument running in theistic circles called the “fine-tuning argument.” This states that if one looks at the fundamental physical constants of nature, that they support the existence of life. But, if even one of these were to be even a slightly different value, the universe could not support life, so obviously God has carefully aligning the constants of the universe like dials on a machine, God is somehow found in the laws of nature and science, the designer hidden in plain sight in the design.

WTF? You mean it wasn’t aliens tampering with our universe? Or maybe Ancient Druids were tickling the ivories of Nature’s Piano? Magic fairies?

My scientific brethren, slow, plodding that they are, shot holes in this “argument” almost immediately but apparently none of the excusigists noticed. I guess a cadre of people still banging upon the Kalam Cosmological Argument can’t be expected to keep up with the nuances of the latest apologist’s baby. (YouTube has dozens of videos debunking this nonsense.)

Okay, allow me to take if from the top. There are a number of aspects of the argument which never seem to be brought up, so I will:

1. Can the fundamental constants of the universe change? (If they can’t change, how could they be changed, to make life possible?)
2. Is there any evidence of any of these constants being different at some other time? (This would establish that said constant can change, for sure.)
3. Studies show that quite a few of these constants could be slightly different from their current values and the universe would hardly be changed.
4.  Since God was pulled out of someone’s ass as the Agent of Change, how was this done? What was this god’s procedure for doing so. (Magic does not seem to exist in our universe, so if you claim it was via magic, explain how your god’s magic works.)
5. Explain how you know that it was your god doing this work and not one of the others. You cannot just claim that those other gods do not exist, unless you are able to explain why your god does exist and the others do not. (The evidence for the existence of any of the thousands of human gods is roughly equivalent, so this is a heavy lift.)

There is more but enough of you have told me that I am abusing your good nature getting some of these things off of my chest.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Impeach President Corrupt Asshole the First! Thank you for your attention to this matter!

God is Good, Right? Am I Right?

In a recent post on Medium.com Shawn B Swinger stated this:

“For Christians to support their faith in God, He must always be good. If He isn’t, even once, then He can’t be the embodiment of absolute goodness. So, when God commands Joshua to kill all the people in the land of Canaan (Deuteronomy 20:16, Joshua 6:17–21 and much more), which includes killing babies and pregnant women, God is good.”

The problem here, is that God isn’t God. The god ordering the ethnic cleansing of the Canaanites is not the same god as the god which is now declared to be “all good.”

Hang with me here.

The concept of this god has changed over time. I do not say it evolved, because it isn’t an evolution but a deliberate changing of the nature of the god involved by the people in charge of worshipping it. And it happened many, many times.

If you start from the beginning, the Israelites were Canaanites. The Canaanites had a whole panoply of gods: El, Asherah, Ba’al, Yahweh, and more. Sound familiar? All of these gods ended up in the Bible and the one with the strongest archeological record is Asherah, often referred to as the Queen of heaven. There have been literally thousands of clay idols of Asherah found in the region.

Yahweh was assigned the region we would refer to as Judah and Samaria and part of Israel. Over time, the religious leaders of his region wanted Yahweh singled out as the chief god and Judaism morphed from being polytheistic to being henotheistic (many gods, but one chief god). Over the entire extent of Hebrew Bible we see a slow transformation of Judaism into a monotheistic religion. (This process continued well into the Current Era.)

Christianity adopted Judaism as a foundation for a new sect/religion based upon a supposed “Son of God.” (The phrase “Son of God” was used to describe every Israelite/Judahite for centuries. It was not an exclusive title within that group.)

The new sect then, carried on the tradition of slowly changing their god into a more acceptable form. It ended up becoming “all-powerful,” “all-knowing,” and “all good.” These were things one would be hard pressed to find in Judaism, very hard pressed.

So, the god of the Old Testament (aka Hebrew Bible rearranged) and the god of the New Testament are really different gods, shaped to fit the people who worshipped them, but the problem comes with the claim that they are one and the same.

More than a few branches of early Christianity had the two gods being actual different gods, but these people got wiped out because politics, not scripture or anything else. The “winners” write the histories, if I recall correctly.

So, if you read the “Old Testament” and try to apply the “God is good” principle, you will end up with a decidedly warped morality. Slavery becomes a good. Rape becomes a good. Genocide becomes a good. And don’t think there aren’t apologists/excusigists on the Internet right now making these points as being valid theology today. You do not have to search hard to find folks talking about killing babies is a net good, etc.

So, as a sometime debater of what constitutes Christian religion, one who gets frustrated by Christians who cherry pick their own scriptures, it is now more easily seen that they must cherry pick their scriptures. Their claim that their god is unchanging and mistake free is just not supported by anything in reality. Their Bibles have god saying the creation of human beings (and all other stuff) is “good” and then shortly thereafter decides that there is so little good to be found in humanity that it has to be talked out of wiping the slate clean by Noah. How is this “all knowing”? How is this “all good”? How can an “all good” god fuck up the creation of a sentient species so badly that the only option an “all-powerful” god can find is “wipe them out; wipe them all out.” They couldn’t be magically changed for the better? No gentle reboot was available? Just “wipe them out”?

“Cherry pick, cherry pick, cherry pick,…” a lost chorus to “The Vatican Rag” by Tom Lehrer.

Lyrics to The Vatican Rag by Tom Lehrer

(for those not born in the last millennium)

First you get down on your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect

Do whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the pontiff
Everybody say his own Kyrie, eleison
Doin’ the Vatican Rag

Get in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional
There the guy who’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original
If it is, try playin’ it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate

So get down upon your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect

Make a cross on your abdomen
When in Rome do like a Roman
Ave Maria, gee it’s good to see ya
Gettin’ ecstatic and sorta dramatic and
Doin’ the Vatican Rag

Tom L. was a mathematician! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blArJj5ST3g)

The Case for God—Just a Start on a Book Review

This book is by Karen Armstrong who, in my opinion, is a superstar author in this genre, so I paid full asking price for this book, when often I would wait (and wait, and wait, …) for the price to come down.

I have only gotten through the introduction and one chapter but have read some disturbing signs. Ms. Armstrong’s thesis is to show us how her god was worshipped way back when to indicate why we are worshipping it all wrong now. Okay, cool, but … some quotes:

“But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. In some ways the modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept.”

“Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action.”

“Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action.”

Gosh could this have anything to do with the revered Paul claiming only faith and not works were needed for salvation?

“Atheism is therefore parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image. Classical Western atheism was developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose ideology was essentially a response to and dictated by the theological perception of God that had developed in Europe and the United States during the modern period.”

WTF? Atheism is a “movement” targeting specific religions to be removed/obliterated and thus is parasitic? WTF? It is true that if theism didn’t exist then atheism wouldn’t also, but to claim atheism is targeting religions for obliteration? And “atheism was developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.” So, it had nothing to do with leaders like Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, George Jacob Holyoake, and Robert Ingersoll? She seems focused in on philosophers rather than actual atheist leaders.

“Religious people have indeed committed atrocities and crimes, and the fundamentalist theology the new atheists attack is indeed ‘unskillful,’ as the Buddhists would say. But they refuse, on principle, to dialogue with theologians who are more representative of mainstream tradition. As a result, their analysis is disappointingly shallow, because it is based on such poor theology. In fact, the new atheists are not radical enough. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is “nothing” out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.”

Again, WTF? Re “But they refuse, on principle, to dialogue with theologians who are more representative of mainstream tradition.” There is a long history of actual leaders debating clerics certainly from Robert Ingersoll’s time but more recently Christopher Hitchens who debated bishops in their turf, churches and cathedrals, for Pete’s sake.

“But a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred was a constant theme not only in Christianity but in the other major faith traditions until the rise of modernity in the West. People believed that God exceeded our thoughts and concepts and could be known only by dedicated practice.”

Okay, I’ll bite and I will keep reading, but … quotes like these:

“Even though so many people are antagonistic to faith, the world is currently experiencing a religious revival.”

“We are seeing a great deal of strident dogmatism today, religious and secular, but there is also a growing appreciation of the value of unknowing.”

… sound like the are coming from the mouth of an apologist/excusigist, not a scholar of her renown. In this country, the U.S., there is no religious revival unless you count religions hating on other religions, as by Christian nationalists and other Trump supports who bash Muslims, etc., that has revived quite a bit, but the percent of U.S. adults declaring their religion to be “none” keeps rising and if that is a religious revival, then not watching the Super Bowl makes you a sports fan. And the only people showing a growing appreciation for unknowing are Fox News viewers and Trump supporters.

Main Point Ms. Armstrong is throwing out the baby, the bath water, and the bath tub of current religious practice, at least in this country, because her god is transcendent, ineffable.

transcendent (adjective): “beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience”

ineffable (adjective) “too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words”

If this god is these things, how does she know anything about it? How does anyone know anything about it? In order to qualify as being ineffable, one would need to know that thing so well to be able to say, “words can’t describe that” but that means it also cannot be transcendent.

I found these last two quotes to be quite disappointing, but I will read on.

From Out of the Woodwork

Now that we have an authoritarian in the White House who is ignoring court orders, ignoring the Constitution, and ignoring public opinion all kinds of “rats” are coming out of the woodwork.

“ICE should be allowed to shoot whomever they please as long as they continue to do God’s work.” (Jon Miller)

“You are one of the most corrupt and profane men to ever be elected to public office. This is nothing but an effort for you to once again deflect and dodge being held accountable for your own lifetime of misdeeds. Shame on you Bill Clinton.” (Jason Rapert on Bill Clinton’s response to Pretti’s murder, and yes Mr. Rapert (interesting name) is an ardent Trump supporter)

Far-right broadcaster Steve Deace says Trump must “stop trying to be reasonable” and make an example out of Minneapolis: “A community must be made an example out of so it’s a cautionary tale, so that everybody still knows what Sodom and Gomorrah means.” (Source Right Wing Watch)

None of these troglodytes were born yesterday, so they much have been in the woodwork all along, no? If you look at how we, as a society, dealt with public tobacco smoking you have an aide as to how society can change behavior. Similarly people using the N-word, out loud in public and bars, and meeting houses, etc. was almost eliminated but then along came the Internet allowing easy anonymous commentary and all that goes by the board. Defamatory language now rules.

Donald Trump has done us one small good service. He has exposed the underside of American culture. Now, what are we going to do about it … or is this how we want to live?

Postscript “There really is no ducking the observation that Christianity is being distorted and abused by some truly vile and deeply obnoxious individuals into something that is dark, superstitious, sinister, oppressive, fundamentally fascist, and filled with intolerance, violence and hatred. All thoughts regarding compassion, tolerance, and basic human decency, and the actual teachings of Jesus have been obliterated and replaced with something deeply dark and malicious.” (David Gamble)

While this is quite true, consider the fact that Christianity primes people to accept authority without question and is quite fine with extreme punishments for small infractions of rules. Christianity is not a victim here, more like a co-conspirator.)

Laws, Laws, Laws …

Donald Trump and his cronys are ignoring or disobeying so many laws that “laws” are a current big topic today. In addition Christians are joining in for the fun and the profit. (Remember when Christians believed in prophets? Now it is profits.)

One aspect of the topic I want to address is the deliberate misunderstanding of what constitute physical laws by Christians, usually one or more steps removed. (Can you spell indoctrination, boys and girls?) What I mean by this is the Christians themselves didn’t make the mistake I will be decribing, it was made for them by Christian influencers: you know apologists/excusigists, what passes for a cleric today, those folks. The poor, non-thinking Christian has been trained to not process or even question the ideas, so they simply “share” them. (Thanks for sharing!)

Theists often are fed this line of argument: “if there are laws, there must be a lawgiver.” This is true if you are considering legal rules and many famous lawgivers are available in human history as examples: Solon of Ancient Greece, for example.

In 1748, famed philosopher David Hume defined natural laws this way: such a law is “a regularity of past experience projected by the mind to future cases.” Brilliant, that is exactly correct. There have even songs written to display this aspect of nature (♫ “The Sun will come up tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that it will …”) The key words are “a regularity” meaning that we see something happening over and over or over and over in the same way and that becomes a dependable predictor of what the future might bring. (Always “might” in that nothing is certain.)

Hume wasn’t clarifying the misunderstanding (deliberate or not) I address here, Hume was arguing that miracles not only do not happen, they basically they cannot happen. Again, this is not something your church leaders will bring up in their sermons.

There are consequences in carving out a healthy part of people’s mental lives and then banishing questions and logical thinking from it. It spills over into politics, which is how a completely execrable person like our current president, Der Trumpenfűhrer, can be viewed as an instrument of god … for the good of all.

Is the Absence of Evidence Evidence of Absence?

The title of this piece comes from a quotation from Carl Sagan and it refers to the search for a god or gods. But this line is often taken out of context and assigned a certain infallibility by religious excusigists. Used in the context of discussions as to whether this or that god exists, it is used to defend against a claim that gods don’t exist due to a lack of evidence for their existence. So, is the absence of evidence evidence of absence?

For the TL/DR folks, I will cut to the chase. Yes, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, just not conclusive evidence.

For those, like me, for whom looking for evidence for things that do not exist seems like a fool’s errand, one needs to address how one knows that something doesn’t exist, for example: Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, garden fairies, jackalopes, snipes? Well, you look, and if you do not find them, the next person who claims they exist receives a “Well, you are going to have to find them because I looked and could not.

It is not that they couldn’t be found, they hadn’t been found, so someone claiming to have found them needs to provide convincing evidence. Especially if 2000 years of earnest looking hasn’t found anything but frauds.

Bolstering all of this is various aspects of context. I want to know from the person making the claim “how do you know this?” As an example, consider the remains of Noah’s Ark. If someone says, “it must exist because the Bible story is so convincing,” then I know they have no evidence, just a story. Stepping back a bit one can ask questions like: if a wooden boat is exposed to the elements for 2000 years, what can we expect to find?” And if taking the story literally, the wood in the ark was the only non-waterlogged wood left on the planet. Somewhat dry wood to build animal pens of, wood for cooking fires, etc. would be very useful, very valuable. Is it reasonable to expect the remains to be even close to being intact? (By way of comparison, Angkor Wat was built in the early 12^th century CE of stone and wood. None of the wood has survived, only the stone.)

A point atheists, like me, often make in the discussion of “evidence” for the existence of various and sundry gods is if the stories are reliable and their god did walk the Earth, there should be evidence of his existence to be found. It is not as if the claims only involve spirit gods who floated through the air.

And, theists do not like it but we also address the probabilities of such an entity existing. All physical entities that we recognize aren’t separated from all of the other entities. We all use something like DNA to reproduce, for example. We all reproduce. We all need sustenance, food, air, water, etc. A being that needs none of these things has no close relatives for us to study. Oh, but you say we are made in your god’s image so we can study ourselves and learn about your god. Okay, how do you know that? And being made in a god’s image, what exactly does that mean? Do we have any god powers? Can we do real magic?

Again, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, just not conclusively so. Conclusions are hard to come by. Scientists consider all of their “findings” to be provisional because we do not know what we will learn in the future, and well we have been wrong before. But Christians want or claim there is conclusive proof of their god’s existence … and I say, good luck with that. This has a bit of a “be careful what you wish for” aspect to it. If scientists or even theists were to supply adequate physical proof of the existence of a god, it would immediately fall out of the supernatural realm and into the natural world. Then what research topic would immediately become the most interesting to myriads of pimply-faced college graduate science students? Yeah, and they would have their noses in your god’s business immediately. Foremost among them would be the biology grad students wanting to determine why a sole god, which has no other god to mate with, would need male reproductive organs so it would be referred to as “he.” Talk about preferred pronouns.