Race is allowed to be complicated

Rachel Dolezal has recently made news for allegedly misrepresenting herself as black.  Note that I am not a newspaper, and I don't necessarily keep up with every single update, and my opinions are subject to update pending further details.  What I know is that she is a leader of a NAACP chapter.  She has four black adopted siblings.   Her two estranged white parents recently came forward saying that she has been misrepresenting herself as black.

Probably the weak point is the story is, has she really been representing herself as black?  The NAACP still seems to support her, saying they accept leaders of all races.  When asked directly by journalists, she gave a dodgy answer, which suggests that she tells people it's complicated, rather than telling people she's black.

I don't really know what it's like to be black, although from a half-Asian perspective I find the treatment of black/white boundaries in the US to be rather... black and white.  There's this one-drop rule, where if you have even a little black ancestry, then you're just black.  And there's hardly any discussion of black culture or the black community as separate from blackness itself.  I'm not saying that the way we think about blackness is wrong, I'm just saying that it's not the only logically coherent way to think about it.

Here's what I know about my own experience:

In college, I somehow ended up in the Filipino retention program (they had similar groups for most minority ethnicities) and I had to awkwardly tell my assigned mentor that I'm not really Filipino.  Sweating, I launched into an explanation of how I probably told the university I was Filipino, though I didn't remember it, and how my mother immigrated from the Philippines but she's ethnically Chinese, but it's not like I lived in the Philippines personally so I guess I'm just Chinese, I mean, half-Chinese.  I was also born in Korea but that doesn't make me Korean.  The mentor told me I was in the right place, but I wasn't sure and felt uncomfortable about it most of the time.  But now I think she was right.

Honestly, I've felt pretty white most of my life.  I am white, or half at least.  I've felt more Asian in recent years mostly due to having a white boyfriend.  We find our respective family's practices to be bizarre at times and I'm getting a better sense for Asian cultural markers in my experience.  These days I understand that English is an official language in the Philippines, and Catholicism is the main religion, and that's why I missed out on some of the more obvious aspects of being a second generation Chinese immigrant.

In short, race is complicated for me, and I sometimes identify as Filipino despite not having any Filipino blood.

I don't know what it's like to be black in this country.  There are some completely different things going on, with opression more closely attached to perceived race than to immigrant culture.  There's also a much more severe history of opression and appropriation.  There are probably good reasons why black and white groups are treated in such black and white terms.

But when there's one individual who says her experience is complicated, there's nothing inherently ridiculous about that.  I can certainly think of problematic motives for such a stance, but it's not necessarily wrong, and honestly how would I know?

Instead I would defer to people who know much better than me: the NAACP.   The NAACP has been supportive of Dolezal, and cites her impeccable track record as an activist.  That's good enough for me until such a time that NAACP changes its story.

...

I also heard from news sources that people on twitter are talking about Dolezal in terms of transraciality and comparing it to transgender.

Transraciality is one of those things that tumblr haters constantly hold up as an obviously ridiculous identity, in complete disproportion to its prevalence as an actual identity.  So I don't see the point of talking about transraciality, since no matter how good or bad it is, it's already been the subject of far more hand-wringing than it could possible deserve.

There's also the really obvious issue that without any clear group of proponents of of transraciality, there isn't any good way to verify the accuracy of its characterization.  You can attack the motivations of transracial people all you want but it's kind of pointless if I don't know whether it's their actual motivations.

In fact, how the hell do I know that purported transracial people are even identifying as transracial?  That's basically what's happening here, since to my knowledge Dolezal has never identified as transracial at all.  This entire line of argument is just taking all the internet stupid and smooshing it together.

How masculinity is like a white Christmas

I grew up in Los Angeles, and every winter it would snow--but only in Hollywood in front of the movie cameras.  We Los Angeles kids, we didn't really know what snow was like, but we knew very well it was supposed to snow in winter.  Also: Santa Claus is supposed to exist and kids are supposed to believe in him, even though he doesn't and I didn't.

Masculinity is also featured prominently on the movie screen.  It's about being the protagonist, shooting everything up, and getting the girl in the end.

Sometimes movies show masculinity and snow simultaneously.  From upcoming James Bond movie, Spectre.

If you ask feminists, they talk extensively about toxic masculinity, which is a collection of expectations of men that hurt men.  Men must always want to have sex, they must never show emotion, and they must solve problems with violence.

I have a hard time believing that this masculinity actually exists.  Next you'll tell me that snow is real!  I'll have you know, I grew up near the movie studios and I've seen what their "snow" looks like close up.

So, given that the masculinity we're presented in movies is totally fake and doesn't affect anyone, I'm left wondering what the hell real masculinity is like.

Here's a thing I used to think about men.  Men are not supposed to care how they look.  They are supposed to generate a random number every morning, and use it to select clothes from a nearly identical line-up of unremarkable clothing.  It turns out, this is a total lie.  Apparently, being a man means dressing up in a suit and tie on special occasions.  People pretend that this is a "neutral" costume, like practically not a costume at all!  I find this such a bizarre belief, that I've begun to question whether my own belief in "neutral" clothing might in fact be equally bizarre.

Here's a thing I used to think about manliness.  Being manly means being a jock.  But then it seems really puzzling why geeks, who are like anti-jocks, are made up entirely of men.  Well okay, there are geek women too, but I've been told there are so few of the real ones that it would be economically impossible for geek culture to ever cater to them.  I sure can't see any way out of this paradox, it's as airtight as a whistle.

Here's a thing I used to think about masculinity.  Masculinity means wanting sex, or at least being expected to want sex.  Except... apparently this is not true of Asian-American men?  It's baffling that my whole life I thought I was expected to fit into one stereotype, but apparently I've really been expected to fit into a different one.  Only, since I'm half-Asian, I guess somewhere between those two?  Gee, I'm glad all these expectations are as fake as snow or they would be quite confusing!

One thing I'm sure about is that there's no point in aspiring to be any more masculine than I happen to be already.  It would be like believing in a religion without knowing what the religion believes in.

Geek cultural hegemony

In the past few weeks, I've been referring to various nerd/geek narratives.  There's the narrative that nerds are socially awkward,  particularly around women.  There's the narrative of being the smart person in your social group.  And there's the narrative of having very geeky niche interests.

There are certain advantages to having "popular" interests.  You have a much easier time finding other people who want to talk about your interests.  A lot more money is devoted to developing products related to your interests.  If you like popular music, you can expect it to be played in retail outlets and nightclubs.  So on and so forth.

What are "geek" interests?  There isn't any precise definition, but we have a wide array of prototypes.  There's sci-fi.  Fantasy.  Anime.  Trading card games.  Dungeons and Dragons.  Video games.  Comic books.  Science.

At some earlier point in time, all of these things were niche interests, primarily loved by geek subcultures.  However, "geek" does not necessarily imply "niche", and so they may persist in being geeky, even if they do not persist in being niche.  In fact, it seems like several of the prototypes I listed are now quite popular.

Blockbuster films have very high budgets, and must be supported by a very popular consumer base.  The infographic on the right is a list of upcoming comic book movies from IO9.  I also show GTAV, one of the best-selling video games of all time, and also one of the most expensive.

If something like Lord of the Rings has vastly more cultural currency than it once did, you might guess that most of the new fans are no longer from the geek subculture.  But so what?  That's what cultural hegemony is.  Even people who are not part of your subculture now feel compelled to recognize the value of your subculture's interests.  Your interests are now popular, and you gain all the associated advantages.  Good for you.

If I sound unsympathetic, it's probably because my biggest geeky interests have not attained a similar degree of popularity.  I'm mostly a math geek.  I like game theory, set theory, real analysis, origami, and logic puzzles.  I have been incidentally interested in sci-fi, but I've never been particularly enthusiastic about it.

From SMBC

One of the antitheses of geek culture is football culture.*  Stereotypically, geeks dislike football, which is fair enough.  Football is injurious to its players, a waste public resources, and most unforgivable of all, incredibly boring.  But most things that have cultural hegemony are obnoxious when they don't personally interest you. 

*That's American football, to all the non-US people.

Maybe it's just because I talk to more geeks than sports fans, but I personally think sci-fi fans are far more obnoxious than football fans.  I can't count the number of times I've been told that I absolutely must see Star Wars, and must read Lord of the Rings or Dune or whatever.  I'm kind of reactionary about it.  I tell people that I actively dislike the "classics".  (Since I'm ace, I privately draw a comparison between the cultural dominance of sci-fi and the cultural dominance of sex.)

Click for bigger original, from XKCD.  My reaction to this comic was that I'd prefer it if people were neither obligated to listen to football, nor to geeky interests they don't care about.  For instance, my dear readers are never forced to read every part of my blog.

Perhaps one of the worst examples of geek cultural hegemony is in video games.  Because the video game market has space for relatively few big-budget games, geeks are incredibly possessive of the medium.  Something like two thirds of US households play video games, and yet geeks complain endlessly that it doesn't count because they aren't the right kinds of video games (because they're casual, or indie, or Call of Duty, or sports games, or Nintendo).  This amounts to having cultural hegemony, and yet still complaining that it's not nearly enough.

Geeks are frequently defined by their opposition to popular culture and appreciation of more niche cultures.  But now that geeks are taking over popular culture, the question is, have geeks learned anything whatsoever about how to be popular without being an asshole about it?

Taking the smart train

As I said earlier, I grew up having a reputation for being smart.  And I as I got older, I also entered increasingly selective intellectual spaces.

My social bubble right now consists almost entirely of educated elite.  Therefore, I strongly suspect that most of my friends went through a significant period of their life having the reputation for being smart, for being a nerd or a geek.  However, this experience does not last forever!

For me, it lasted for a long time, probably more than most.  I was the top of my class in middle school.  In my private high school, I was only in the top ten or so, but it was also widely known that I was the best at math.  In college, I was a physics major, which is already enough to get you labeled as smart among non-physics people.  Even among physics people, I was known for getting exam scores so high that they'd need to be excluded from the grading curve.  When did I ever get off the smart train?

Image borrowed from a transit blog, with apologies.

I finally got off at grad school.  I got good grades in my classes, but who cares about grades in physics grad school?  And now I don't take classes at all. It turns out that test-taking skills don't transfer perfectly to research.

I am fine with this.  The smart train wasn't so great anyway.  I was increasingly disillusioned with it by the end.

It is right and good that intelligence and academics are celebrated in our society.  It's important to the betterment of society, and also just intrinsically desirable.  However, living as an example of what is celebrated is fraught with problems.

There are the awkward nerd stereotypes discussed before.  There's the jealousy.  There are the expectations.

And there's the blatant unfairness of it all.  I have no idea why I had more academic success than other people.  Talent?  Upbringing by educated well-to-do parents?  Hard work?  I sure didn't feel like I was working hard, I felt like I was lazy.  I hated that other students felt like they could never do as well as me, no matter how hard they worked.  I hated that Biology and History students felt dumber than me.

That's my personal attitude.  And I think it's been quite adaptive, because I was able to step off the train relatively safely.  From what I've heard, some people only get off the train when it crashes.

I'm speculating here, but the main problem seems to be hubris.  You're told that you're smart, and that makes you better than other people.  So you simply believe it.  But eventually you get to such a level of education where your peers are as smart or smarter than you.  It's the Peter Principle for nerds.  And then what's left?

Growing up smart

So far my blogging in 2015 has been very technical, and I say... the worst is yet to come!  To balance it out, I present some anecdotal fluffiness.

A little while ago, the internet was chattering about Scott Aaronson, EECS professor at MIT.  He had a blog comment talking about his problems growing up, and how his own feminism made him afraid of approaching women.  This was picked up by several mainstream news sources--here's one example.

When I saw Scott Aaronson's comment, my main reaction was, I don't relate to that at all.  Perhaps this is only natural, since I'm not attracted to women.  On the other hand, I am skeptical that the typical heterosexual male nerd is so afraid of accidentally harassing women, that they have constant suicidal thoughts.  I mean... really?  I can believe it for Scott Aaronson, especially after I learned that he began college at age 15 or so, but the idea that most nerds have the same problems beggars belief.

Nonetheless, the story went viral under the pretense that it represents the nerd narrative.  You know what, maybe the problem is we need more nerd narratives.  Here's one.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Modesty forbids me from saying that I am smart.  But I know I am smart, and have known since elementary school.  No one would ever let me forget it.

Let me tell you about the smart kid.  In children's cartoon shows, you'd often have a bunch of characters, one of whom is the smart kid.  But fictional characters cannot be perfect, so they have to have some flaws, such as anxiety or social awkwardness.  And frequently the characters are flanderized so that they're really smart and really awkward.

Recess was a show that was on when I was a kid.  The smart one is Gretchen, the girl on the right. Actually I'm not sure whether she was socially awkward; mostly she was just a minor character. (source)

So that's who you're supposed to be.  That's what you try to be, and what everyone else makes you out to be.  And for what it's worth, it was true.

It was also self-fulfilling, in part.  Social skills are, to some extent, skills that you develop.  Smart kids are not encouraged to develop it.  From the nerd's point of view, intelligence is simply an innate part of who you are, and it seems only natural that being good at socializing is another innate part of who you are.  Nerds curse their own awkwardness, but they are not encouraged to do much about it.  Though to be fair, nobody is really clear on how to develop social skills, and kids and teens are some of the absolute hardest people to socialize with.

...

Yeah, okay, but things changed when I got older.  I entered increasingly selective spaces.  My middle school had a magnet program.  My high school was one of the top private schools in Los Angeles.  And then I went to UCLA.

It was a gradual process, but by the time I got to UCLA, I realized I am absolutely surrounded by nerds.  The chipper RA who made the arty displays in the dorm hallways, she was a total nerd.  The souzaphone player who had loud sex next door, total nerd.  The roommate who spent all his time making YouTube videos about hockey, what an utter nerd.  Seriously, most of these people were among the very few selected from their high schools, and most had, at some point in their lives, a reputation for being smart.

Intelligence is sort of like social class.  The wealthiest people tend not to realize how far above the median they are, because they surround themselves with similarly wealthy people.  The most educated and intelligent people also surround themselves with educated and intelligent people, and tend to forget just how nerdy all their friends are.

Once I saw it, I realized, nerdiness is meaningless.  Nerds have hardly anything in common.

If you are young and think of yourself as a nerd, here's what I have to say:  You can still be whoever you damn please.

Personal thoughts on the four campfires of art

Scott McCloud is a cartoonist, and the leading theorist of comic arts.  In his book Making Comics, McCloud proposed the idea of the "four campfires of art", also known as "tribes of art" or "passions of art".  It's a way of dividing art or artists into four types.  But perhaps it's better understood as dividing art into four aspirations, since any particular artist or work of art can draw from multiple campfires.

For a description of the four campfires, here's a good blog post, or you can see what McCloud himself says in his TED talk or in this interview.

Image taken from McCloud's TED talk.

In addition to those links, I offer a very brief description:

• Classicists focus on beauty, and mastery of the artform.
• Animists focus on content, trying to present their story or ideas in the clearest way possible.
• Formalists focus on form, exploring the contours of the medium.
• Iconoclasts focus on truth, especially by targeting artistic conventions which gloss over truth.

Though McCloud is coming from the perspective of comics, they also may apply to other art forms, such as fine arts, literature, movies, music, and video games.

I find these four campfires to be personally validating, so much to the extent that I cannot offer any general commentary on them, and only offer my personal feelings.

I take one look at the four campfires, and it's blatantly obvious which one I fall into, both in my appreciation of art, and in my recent attempts to write a novel.  I'm an iconoclast. I really like fiction that deconstructs common tropes.  I like art that turns common moments into objects of fascination.  When I set out to write a novel, I end up writing a novel about a narrator whose major flaw is too much trust in tropes.

I also appreciate formalism and animism, but the campfire that is hardest for me to understand is classicism.  I think the category somewhat suffers from its association with "classic" art, because I think that most of the time when artwork gets immortalized as "classic", it's not because the artist set out to do so.

For example, is Shakespeare a classicist?  A lot of Shakespeare focuses on the details of the plot, and linguistic wit of the characters, both of which are animist values.  However, regardless of artistic intention, perhaps classicism is the main thing people get out of Shakespeare today, if only because the other values don't age as well.  I don't know, I don't really care for Shakespeare.  Or classic works in general, really.

I find the four campfires personally validating, because I really like art, but this is hard to explain when I'm not much into popular art, and dislike most classic art.  Also, my favorite thing to do with art is complain about it.  But it seems there's still a place for me at one of the campfires.

Which of the four campfires would you say you value most?

Judgment, anger, and me

I am a very judgmental person.  I'd have to be, to maintain an blog about my opinions for so long.

This remains true even as I've become influenced by queer ideas of non-judgmentalism with regard to people's orientation, behavior, and identity.  Now I just have really strong opinions (judgments!) about when judgmentalism is appropriate and when it is not.  When it is not appropriate, I refrain from expressing any judgment, even if I do not refrain from thinking it.

But perhaps there need to be multiple axes of judgmentalism, because there is another sense in which I'm not very judgmental at all.  I have a large quantity of judgments, but they're mostly small judgments.  I don't think you're a terrible person for having done something wrong.  You're just a normal person because in my view, everyone is doing things wrong, and I also have thoughts about what in particular they're doing wrong.

For example, I don't think very highly of the trolls I occasionally get in my comments, but I also think they're probably not so bad elsewhere or offline.  They are terrible at arguing, and often have terrible opinions, but that's pretty much all I know about them.  Perhaps if we interacted in a different context they'd be more sensible and competent, who knows?

This is also applicable to public intellectuals.  For instance, for years now, some people have been pretty upset with Richard Dawkins, going so far as to say they will no longer buy books from him or otherwise consume his work.  Now, I think Dawkins' infamous "Dear Muslima" comment* was really stupid, blindingly stupid.  Even Sam Harris's stupidity is given a run for its money.  On the other hand, do people not remember Dawkins' other stupid comments?  Like how "Neville Chamberlain atheists" is a backhanded comparison of religion to Nazism?  Or how the comparison of religion to child abuse created years of unproductive arguments?  Or the stupid stuff he said about fantasy fiction?  And what about memes?  And brights?  Dawkins has been perpetually been putting his foot in mouth for years.

*Apparently he recently apologized for this.

Maybe "Dear Muslima" was worse than all that, either for being especially stupid, especially harmful, or especially emblematic.  But I just can't maintain my anger about it, never could.  I'm just not emotionally disposed to do that.

But also, I can't be angry at people who went so far as to shun Richard Dawkins.  Seems to me that that's their own prerogative.

I'm not saying that my way is the right way.  On the contrary, I am saying that this is one of my biases.  I don't get very angry at people, regardless of whether I should.  I don't hold grudges against people, regardless of whether I should.  It's common for people to say "criticize the opinion, not the person", and that's what I do, not because it is the right thing to do, but quite simply because it is my emotional default.

This bias has led to real life problems in my leadership experience.  I get along with people who don't get along with each other.  As a result, I've promoted officers who were problematic, and have been poorly prepared for the consequences.  Because I just don't get it.  What is this emotional response that other people are feeling but I'm not?

Since this is a recognized personal bias, I take steps to compensate for it.  I don't try to fake emotions, because my emotional response is real and just as valid as anyone else's.  But I make a point to remember that a person's past actions are predictive of their future actions, and I guard myself against unwarranted optimism.  And I remember that most other people do have a stronger anger response, that not everyone is exactly like me.  Lastly, I realize that calmness is valued in our culture, but I question that value, because calmness does not make me a superior person.

Why I am ambivalent about skepticism

You know, I don't read any specifically skeptical blogs anymore?  I can't remember when I dropped the last one, but I dropped Skepticblog because I found I wasn't actually reading through anything there.  In general, my reading list has shrunk over the years, and I now track about 10 blogs in the broader atheist/rationalist/reality-based/science community.

There are many ways to define modern skepticism.  It's a philosophy, a community, and a set of institutions.  But I find that I am becoming disconnected from each of these definitions, one by one.  I don't work for, or give money to any skeptical institutions.  And my interests have shifted such that I no longer read any specifically skeptical material.  That just leaves the philosophy.

The thing about skeptical philosophy is that skepticism does not have a monopoly on critical thinking.  One can be a perfectly adequate critical thinker with or without skepticism.  However, I think my outlook is part of a distinctively skeptical tradition.  It's valuing criticism, arguments, and evidence, even over short-term happiness or political gain.  It's that peculiar combination of enjoying intellectual discussions for their own sake, while also listening to the voice of pragmatism.  It's suspicion of all narratives, especially one's own narratives.  It's giving a shit about what other people believe and why they believe it.

But how much does that count for?  And I haven't been paying attention lately, so for all I know the skeptical movement has shifted when I wasn't looking.

I mean, it wouldn't be so extraordinary in these times, for skepticism to redefine itself in light of the growing atheist/rationalist/reality-based communities.

What I find really distasteful is the particular ways in which popular skepticism has begun to distinguish itself from the rest of the rationalist community.  As I've described before, skeptical leaders have made some major mistakes which sided themselves antifeminist factions in the atheist community.  There were some ridiculous issues with harassment policies at conferences, and the revelations that certain skeptical leaders participate in harassment.  This is terrible, because now the kind of people who are likely to defend that sort of behavior are more likely to identify as skeptics, and people who find it disgraceful are less likely to identify.

But whatever, I can be a skeptic and still be a feminist.  Nobody ever said that skeptics can't be critical of one another, and in fact it's practically a requirement.

Another way skepticism has been redefining itself is in its scope.  Almost a year ago, there was a little scuffle between Skeptic magazine writer Daniel Loxton, who argued that skepticism should be modest in scope, and atheists who thought it should be broader.  I thought Loxton made a compelling case.*  Daniel Loxton works with investigative skepticism, and it is reasonable to limit investigative skepticism to claims that can, as a practical matter, be investigated by skeptics.  But where does that leave us lay skeptics?  I asked him, and he said,

People should of course arrange and prioritize their personal lives in whatever way seems best. For myself, I am not especially interested in building a subculture of self-indentifying skeptics, but in skepticism as a field of research and activity pursued by professional, semi-professional, and expert-amatuer practitioners (and by serious volunteers and learners at other stages of development of their practice).

*I thought that people on the other side also made a compelling case.  I don't agree with myself.

Loxton is not personally interested in building popular skepticism, which is well and good since he is not the only one running the movement.  But since then I've been wondering, is anyone really interested in building popular skepticism anymore?  Is it just me, or has popular skepticism shrunk, and been displaced by a broader atheist/rationalist/reality-based/science community?

I don't know, it could just look that way because my own interest has shrunk.  I wanted to test my hypothesis by looking up Skeptic magazine subscription numbers over time, but I couldn't find the numbers (and anyway it's confounded by the overall decline of print media).

In summary:

• I'm losing interest in reading skeptical material.
• I think my philosophical outlook is distinctively skeptical, but I'm not sure this counts for much.
• The skeptical community is starting to differentiate itself from other rationalist communities by being particularly unfeminist.
• Popular skepticism appears to be shrinking.

This leaves me rather ambivalent.  I still think of myself as a skeptic, or skeptical, but I probably wouldn't put it in a blog title if I started a new blog.   I'm a little sad about this, but I should not be sad.  Hobbies are mortal, and when they die they just get replaced with more hobbies.

The Bible is boring

Because I hang out with atheist student groups, the Bible comes up every so often.  My official position on the Bible is that it's more boring than The Lord of the Rings.  I tell people this as a way of changing the subject--many atheists just won't let go of the implication that The Lord of the Rings is awful--and as a way of reminding people that there is no accounting for taste.

Oh, but underneath the talk, there is accounting for my taste.  I know why I feel the Bible is boring.  It has to do with my Catholic upbringing.

Catholics are known deemphasizing the Bible, as compared to protestants.  This makes historical sense, since Protestantism was caused by the printing press and mass literacy.  And I think it's generally true today, or at least it's been true in my experience.  I never owned a copy of the Bible.  As a kid, I never read it.

As a kid, I only ever heard Bible readings during the Catholic Mass.  Catholic Masses are said to be particularly boring among Christian services.  I myself was so bored by Mass that eventually I refused to go against the will of my mother, many years before I quit Catholicism.  It didn't help that when I was young I had auditory processing difficulties, made all the worse by the echoing acoustics of a Catholic church.  I could maybe understand the Bible readings if I focused really hard, but what was the point?  It was all so boring and pointless, like the rest of Mass.

When I was older, I did read parts of the Bible.  I went to a Jesuit high school, and we had a class in scripture.  We didn't read the whole thing, just bits and pieces considered important in Catholicism.  For the most part, we learned about the general structure, and what various books were about.  I don't remember much of it.  I remember the motivations of the different gospels, and I remember a few of Jesus' parables.  Mostly I remember it being incredibly boring, just like nearly every other book we read in high school.

Dear readers, did any of you have the same experience of hating nearly every book you read in high school?  It seems to be a common experience, though I'm not sure why.  Is it because teenagers just don't appreciate the kind of books that English teachers think are edifying?  Is it because the reading is forced?  Whatever the reason, I felt that way about the Bible.  This isn't entirely rational, of course.  I'm sure there are some books I read in high school that I could read again and discover that they were quite decent all along.  But in the Bible's case, I'm sure I would still find it terrible.

For one thing, I know that what I saw in high school were the "good" parts of the Bible.  It can only get worse from there

For another thing, what I know about the Bible just doesn't line up with my taste in reading.  I don't like reading "so bad it's good" stuff.  I generally don't like "classic" literature.  I don't think it is important to recognize cultural references to classic literature (what good does that do for me or for society?), and anyway I already recognize most Bible references because of my education.  What I like in a book is willingness to criticize itself and its own messaging.  I also like books that focus on the subtleties and ironies of modern social interactions--not really the kind of thing that translates across millenia?

Some atheists will argue at length about what is the "correct" interpretation of the Bible, mostly so they can accuse various Christians of not following it.  Sometimes I think these arguments are a bit sketchy (but no more so than Christian interpretations), but mostly I just don't care. There may be some utility to such an argument, but since I have no interest in investing the time, I prefer to argue that it doesn't matter.  The Bible isn't an authority on what's right, nor on what's wrong, so a person's degree of faithfulness to the Bible is irrelevant to my moral approval.  I don't even consider faithfulness to the Bible to be a measure of religiosity or Christian-ness.  After all, I came from a Catholic background, where the Bible was deemphasized, and I don't think Catholics are any less Christian for it.

How puzzling influenced me

My ghost of internet past

Dear readers, what was your first introduction to the internet?

I'm part of the "millenial" generation, which means I grew up with the internet.  Well, sort of--I didn't actually pay the internet any attention until high school.  The point is, I had internet at such a time that it was important to the development of my identity.

But my introduction to the internet was not through blogs or forums or anything like that.  My introduction was through a small puzzle website called Perplexus.  Surprisingly, the website is still alive after 10 years, with not much changed. Perplexus publishes daily word problems, much like the puzzles that I occasionally publish on this blog (no coincidence there).  The content is user-submitted, and also selected by higher-ranking members.  I wrote over seventy puzzles over the course of three or four years.

I think I've mentioned Perplexus a few times in the past, but never by name or in detail.  I think I've been embarrassed, as I always feel embarrassed by old internet activity.  What an awkward dork past-me was!  I probably said such stupid things!  Not that I remember anything stupid in particular.

But I do remember things.  I remember learning a bit of html code, because some parts of the site require it to make links or line breaks.  I remember learning about combinatorics, the mathematics of counting.  I remember learning modular arithmetic.  I remember arguing about the urn problem, the 1.99999... = 2 problem, and the envelope paradox.  I remember learning about Raymond Smullyan and Martin Gardner.

Some of my memories also demonstrate how Perplexus dominated my internet world.  I learned all the ins and outs of the ranking system, and the complicated queue system for submitted puzzles.  The queue itself seemed like a puzzle to me.  I dug through the forum archives once, because I was interested in the social history of the site.  I read about a kid who was once caught sockpuppeting, on a puzzle website of all places.  That fascinated me, though I did not think it strange.

I looked at the webpages of regulars who had them.  There was a guy who it seemed could solve every puzzle very quickly, and who frequently irritated other members by solving it with a computer.  I respected him a lot.  His personal webpage had a series of essays about why he left Catholicism.  Some time later, I left Catholicism, though I think that's something I would have done anyway.

I do this for fun

At the time I had this philosophy.  Doing puzzles was a thing I did for fun.  Because it was an intellectual activity, I knew that some people might think of it as a useful, virtuous activity, like exercising.  But I rejected that idea, and insisted I was doing it for fun, not to learn things.

Did my philosophy stand the test of time?  Did solving puzzles impact my later life?  I often doubt that it had much effect.  Some stuff I learned was just useless.  Like Polya theory, what's that good for?  Or the method to solve lines-through-points puzzles?  Or coin-weighing puzzles?

But when I describe my life, it seems obvious that puzzles did have an impact.  I still have a fondness for shapes, as you might have noticed.  I still like to joke about set theory.  And it affected my career too.  Because of my problem-solving skills, I always had an easy time in math and physics courses.  I used to joke that I majored in physics because it was the easiest subject, and that was really true for me.  After undergraduate, problems are much more open-ended and un-puzzle-like.  But the skills still transfer over.

On this blog, I also consider issues that are more open-ended and un-puzzle-like.  And yet my approach tends to be the same approach I have to puzzles, if that makes any sense.  A puzzle is not about the answer;  If it were about the answer, then you could just look up the answer and be satisfied.  A puzzle is about the process.  It's about the challenge.  It's about the little mathematical tidbits we learn along the way.

Most importantly, it's about fun.

Why do I blog?

I'm going through one of those rare moments where I'm not an ever-flowing fountain of blog topics.  So let's go meta.  What's my motivation for blogging?  I've been around for over five years, maybe it's time I answered that question.

I first started reading blogs around 2006, when I started going to college.  At first I only read the Bad Astronomy blog.  Back then, the blog was hosted on the Bad Astronomy webpage, which I had serendipitously discovered through the Internet Anagram Server.  I remember discussions of astronomy, alternative medicine, pareidolia, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster (which was new at the time).  I remember periodically browsing the blogroll, which included Pharyngula, Skeptico, and Memoirs of a Skepchick (back then it was just Rebecca Watson).

At some point I discovered rss, and started reading lots of blogs regularly.  I tried most of the ScienceBlogs, the major atheist blogs, and skeptical blogs.  This set my expectations for what a blog should be like.  I read blogs written by ordinary people, as opposed to journalists.  But they were not about personal lives, they were about science, politics, religion, and opinions opinions opinions.  They were ordinary people who gained influence.

I was so much into blogs that of course I had to start my own.  It was a way for me to take a more participatory role.  I also harbored ambitions of being one of those ordinary people with influence.  But after a few years I decided being a powerful blogger wasn't for me.  Popular bloggers like PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta have to put a lot of work into it!  They probably get hundreds of e-mails, and post several things a day.  I'm also pretty sure I would not use my power very well.  Instead of doing things to help people I'd probably just talk about math and logical fallacies.  And then I'd upset my expert readers for saying stuff all wrong.

When I was more ambitious, I was very interested in increasing my hit rate.  But what killed it for me was when my hit rate became dominated by Google image searches for puppies and kittens.  This landed people on a page that really had nothing to do with puppies and kittens.  Man, page hits, what good do they do me?

Whether this is rational or not, the pendulum swings the other way, and now I just don't care if I have many readers.  Not that I'm trying to push you away, dear reader.  It's just... I realize I don't get very many comments these days, and that's just fine with me really.  I now see different advantages to blogging.

I know every blogger says this, and I say it too: I blog for me.

Blogging gives me a much more active and interesting intellectual life.  It gives me an excuse to read about random topics, and a reason to try to get it right.  It's a sort of precommitment strategy to think about stuff on a regular basis so I have blogging material.

If it weren't for blogs, when would I ever have stimulating discussion?  Most people seem to go to internet comments, or they go to Facebook.  But pretty much everyone agrees that Facebook discussions are not very deep.  Blogging allows for deeper discussion, even if it's one-sided.  Getting to choose the topics is also nice, especially since I like to talk about stuff that would bore most of my meatspace friends.

Generally speaking, offline discussions pale in comparison.  In the local secular group some people don't even know what Elevatorgate was.  In local ace meetups, sometimes there are people who don't know what gray-A is.  I've attended local gay groups that thought the concept of transgender was just so novel.  I think it's a general principle.  I had a friend who liked to argue with 9/11 truthers, and he told me that offline truthers would mess up arguments that all the online truthers would get right.  It's true of conspiracy theorists, it's true in general.

Another advantage of blogging is that I no longer feel the need to participate in unenjoyable arguments.  I have blogging, which is a much better outlet.  Local discussion groups are great, but I don't need them for the discussion.  As for Facebook arguments, they are not missed.

I'm so attached to blogging, that I've stuck with it for over five years.  If "inability to give up on a blog" is a skill, I have it.  When I launched The Asexual Agenda, the point was to put this skill to good use.  Most asexual blogs are too short-lived, so my talent for maintaining a blog for a very long time is useful.  If only atheist activism were as easy as this!

TL;DR I blog because it leads to a richer intellectual life for me.

Yes I'm one of those atheists

This is part of my "Fantastic Primer" series, which incorporates a few fictional elements.  Please read the introductory post, which explains the premise.

Why I'm not so worried

In the previous post of this series, I explained why I had really low expectations of how my atheist readers would react to asexuality.  In contrast, I think my asexual readers will hardly be bothered by my atheism.  Why?  Because of this:

The data is from this survey, although some of it may not be in the public report.  I did not choose how to aggregate the groups; I would have split spiritual and non-religious groups.  Non-religious non-spiritual people make up 19%.

I don't know why there are so many atheists, agnostics, and non-religious people.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the community is centered online, or that its members are relatively young.  Or perhaps it's in who decides to stick around the asexual community.  Or it could be that religious asexuals are less likely to search for ways to understand themselves outside of abstinence and celibacy.  An indulgent explanation is that identifying as asexual requires some introspection, and that introspective people are more likely to leave religion.

In any case, any asexual who interacts with the asexual community probably interacts with a lot of atheists, agnostics, and non-religious people.  It's hard to see it as a big deal when you do it all the time.

On the other hand, even non-religious people, even self-identified atheists, sometimes have prejudices about those atheists.  You know the ones.  The "new atheists", "fundamentalist atheists", "militant atheists", or what-have-you.  They not only disbelieve religions, they actively oppose religions and faith.  They're angry, they're jerks, they're dogmatic, they only ever respond to fundamentalist religions, they're mocking, etc. etc.  Yeah, those.  I'm one of those, minus the stereotypes.  For want of a better term, let's call us "movement atheists."  (This is just my term, not an established label.)

And that's why, even though I'm not worried, I think there is still some utility in explaining where I'm coming from.

No I'm not here to deconvert you

Lots of people have told me stories about that one atheist they knew in high school, who was a jerk about it.  They tried to argue everyone around them out of religion, sometimes pushing people to tears.  I'm not sure what to make of these anecdotes.  I guess they were just assholes?  I don't really have enough information to say?  I've heard a smaller number of similar anecdotes about asexuals who were really pushy.  What do you make of those?

I think it will become immediately obvious that I am not very pushy.  Persuading people out of religion is by all accounts very difficult, and could only possibly be accomplished over a period of decades.  I don't see the point of working at it with every word I write.  When I do try to persuade people, I only do it a little at a time, by writing things on the internet that people are free to ignore.  In this series here, I'm not trying to persuade people out of religion at all.

Most stereotypes of movement atheists directly contradict my experience.  I don't think religion is the root of all evil.  I recognize that lots of religious people are in opposition to religious fundamentalism.  I don't even think all religion is bad.*  I'm not that angry or passionate.  Basically I just think that: a) Religious beliefs are wrong, b) these beliefs frequently cause harm, and c) this is a problem that personally interests me.  I don't have to believe that religion is the biggest issue in the world to advocate atheism, just like I don't need to believe that asexuals have it the worst in order to advocate asexual visibility.

*I withhold judgement on religions I'm unfamiliar with, though I think supernatural beliefs are all wrong.  This is not a consensus in movement atheism, it's just my own position.

I think an apt comparison is to politics.  It's more than a comparison really--it is politics.  Atheism vs religion is really a parallel universe of politics.  When my friends talk about politics, they talk about the latest scandal or crisis, and various stupid things that politicians have done.  Many of my queer friends talk about the parallel universe of queer politics, which is mostly about problematic things said by various people.  As for movement atheists, they talk about stupid things that religious leaders and politicians say.

With that in mind, my view of atheists is similar to how a democrat might view other democrats.  I can admit that atheists on average have some excesses.  I don't always like what organizations or leaders say.  As for pushy atheists, they're not much different from pushy liberals.  Arguments can become unproductive, but there's nothing wrong with arguing in principle.  Compare it to religious evangelism if you like, but I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with religious people advancing their own beliefs, except that those beliefs happen to be incorrect.

How I fell into movement atheism

Of course, that's just my attitude, and here I must add standard disclaimers about how I can't really represent a whole group.  In fact, I should really explain my particular background.

I grew up Catholic, in California.  My family was not particularly religiously observant.  I attended church weekly when I was young, but at some point I stopped because I found it excruciatingly boring.*  My father married into Catholicism and did not attend church.  My parents didn't care to instill ideas of heaven and hell, and had a rather secular morality.  I went to public school, except for my high school which was a Jesuit school.**

*Catholic services are reputed to be especially boring, but I didn't know that at the time.  All I knew was that the Church was too echoey, and I didn't understand a thing said.
**Jesuits are a relatively liberal and intellectual organization within Catholicism.  They run good schools.

During my last years of high school I was very interested in skepticism.  I liked Michael Shermer's Skeptic column in Scientific American.  My favorite column was one about bottled water (which was becoming fashionable at the time), and how it was no better than tap water.  I was interested in critical thinking and effective methods for aligning beliefs with reality.  I applied this thinking to religion too, though somehow I knew that I wasn't "supposed" to do this.  I discretely read a deist's personal webpage, and I compared his arguments to those in the apologetics classes I was taking at the time.  After I graduated, I decided to identify as an atheist and not Catholic.

And for some reason, I waited a year to come out.  I basically didn't have a good reason to wait.  My mother was upset at first, but otherwise my parents accepted it just fine.  Much later, when I identified as asexual, I didn't hesitate to come out immediately.

I started reading blogs when I was in college.  At first I only read the Bad Astronomy Blog, which grew out of a website that debunked moon hoax conspiracy theories.  From there I started reading other skeptical blogs and atheist blogs (which are two different things, to be explained later), and then I started a blog myself.

Later, when I came out, I decided to try the skeptical student group on campus.  They were a really eccentric bunch, but I liked them.  I guess I'm a joiner!  (This is probably also why I stick around asexual communities.)  I served as president of the skeptical group for a year.  I wasn't a very good leader, in my honest opinion.  In my new university as a grad student, I participate in the atheist student group, but I stay away from leadership roles.

To sum up some key details, I grew up very liberal and nominal Catholic.  I didn't leave the Church out of anger or distaste, or in reaction to conservative elements.  I left it because I disagreed with high-minded philosophical arguments.  I often think I am too dispassionate about Catholicism's harmful attitudes about queerness, abortion, birth control, and so forth, just because they weren't relevant to my own experience.  I'm thankful that movement atheists are a diverse bunch, with some more passionate than others.

I'm not much of an activist, because all I really do is discuss things.  In particular, I stick to atheist blogs and atheist student groups. Perhaps I could be called a dillettante, but this is not much different from people who comment on various political news stories without being political activists.

Next time, I will talk about the various goals of movement atheism.

Refs:
A realistic way to categorize atheists (in which I define the "movement atheist" distinction)
Why atheists focus on certain religions

The Fantastic Primer series:
1. Introduction
2. Why I don't trust you
3. Yes, I'm one of those atheists
4. A skeptically-oriented Asexuality 101 
5. Atheism as minority, atheism as political cause 
6. Atheism and asexuality: a historical comparison  
7. Why atheism and asexuality taste great together 

Attacks on my boyfriend

This was cross-posted on The Asexual Agenda.

I'm openly asexual, and I also pay attention to media mentions of asexuality.  So I've heard all the standard attacks and denials.  I can handle them.

But here's what I think is particularly nasty: attacks on my boyfriend.

This happened a few times in my boyfriend's circle of friends.  It's a fairly typical circle of friends in that it consists of people who are mostly the same age, race, and social class.  This particular circle consists mostly of gay white educated young men.  They're my friends too, of course, and I have nothing against them.

A year ago, one of these men, named J, found out that my boyfriend and I were going to an asexual meetup that weekend.  Meetups are something we do on occasion.  We go to a cafe and have casual conversations about whatever people like.  More often than not, what we discuss has nothing to do with asexuality.  J seemed to have a different image in mind though.  J accused my boyfriend, over instant messages, of getting into a sexless relationship for me.  He said I was trying to convert him to asexuality.

On a more recent occasion, my boyfriend went to a movie night.  This is something we do every few weeks, but this particular week I was out of town so he was there without me.  The host of the movie night says to my boyfriend, "So, I heard you were asexual.  What's that about?"  My boyfriend had to explain that I was asexual, but he wasn't.  This led to a situation where all his friends were quizzing him on asexuality.

My boyfriend felt very uncomfortable, because he felt put on the spot to defend the legitimacy of our relationship to his friends.  He felt like he was in a double-bind.  First they assumed that we're in a sexless relationship, and then they questioned the legitimacy of sexless relationships.  My boyfriend wanted to inform them that our relationship is sexually active, but also didn't want to imply that sexless relationships were somehow less legitimate.

That's what bothered my boyfriend the most, but I was more bothered by the larger pattern of behavior.  They pounced on him when I wasn't there.  It felt like they were using underhanded tactics to hit me at my weak spot.  And they've never mentioned any of it to me, even though my boyfriend said they should redirect questions to me.

It's true that I'm not as close of a friend to them, and that may explain their behavior.  But if they were really interested in learning about asexuality, they should have asked the more knowledgeable person.  My boyfriend is not asexual.  He gets all his information about asexuality secondhand through me.  He doesn't necessarily know how to respond to all the standard attacks.  And why should he have to?  Asexuality isn't his own lived experience.

On another occasion, a different friend said to me in front of my boyfriend, "You're the most sexually active asexual I know."  That was awkward, and assumed knowledge about our sex lives.  But you know, that wasn't as bad, because at least he said it to my face.

Holding hands

My new favorite webcomic is O Human Star (occasionally NSFW).  It's about a man who dies and goes to the future, where he must confront his gender identity issues in cyborg form.  Classic!

Anyway, these few panels made me nostalgic.

sadface (from O Human Star)

I remember back in middle school when my girlfriend wanted to hold hands with me.  Why?? I did not understand the appeal.  That's just something you do to be socially identifiable as a couple, right?  It didn't make sense at all.

Much later when I dated a guy for the first time, I was surprised that I actually wanted to hold hands with him.  Weeeeird!  Anyway, he refused, possibly because he was closeted.  I didn't realize quite how oppressive the taboo against men holding hands was until then.

Nowadays, my boyfriend and I hold hands all the time and generally engage in a lot of PDA.  Straight people are usually too embarrassed to say anything, but our gay friends occasionally complain.  Ha, like they can stop us!

My tolerance for BS

Recently I was asked (in private communication) how I'm able to tolerate so much BS, despite being all into critical thinking.  My interlocutor, of course, had some specific examples of BS in mind, and the simplest explanation was that I simply didn't agree that those particular examples were BS.

But this still raises the question, how does my enthusiasm for critical thinking affect my standards?  Do I sniff at fallacies all the time?  Do I only read blogs and news sources that feature consistently sound reasoning?  Do I choose friends and communities based on their critical thinking skills?

In my opinion, it doesn't really raise my standards much, in terms of what I read and who I associate with.

In part, someone who argues well is indistinguishable from someone who I agree with a lot.  So if I surround myself with people who I perceive to argue well, that's a recipe to surround myself with people who agree with me.  That might be nice, but it's not exactly a critical thinking value.

The other problem is my general sense that nearly everyone makes bad arguments some of the time.  It's just not feasible to limit myself to those who don't.  Another way of putting it is that I disagree with everyone, so I'm not particularly bothered by the fact that I disagree with any particular person.  I don't think skeptics are reliably better, they just think about it more often.

I do have a tendency to recognize fallacies and cognitive biases wherever I go.  I've joked that many of my friends are cognitive biases personified.  There's Rationalize-All-Established-Habits, Everyone-Must-Hate-the-Same-Things-As-Me, I'll-Believe-What's-Flattering-or-Politically-Convenient, Take-the-Most-Dramatic-Interpretation-Possible, etc.  And of course my boyfriend, Inattentional-Blindness.  But I can't blame my friends for being human.

Boy Scouts and the Order of the Arrow

I had a negative experience with the Boy Scouts growing up.  It really has nothing to do with BSA's official exclusion of agnostics, atheists, and gay people.  I didn't think of myself that way at the time, and anyway, BSA's pro-discrimination policies aren't typically enforced.  My problem was I just didn't fit in with the other kids.  They were immature and could be kind of mean.  I quit some years before 18, the maximum scout age.

My younger brother was in a different troop from me, and had a much more positive experience.  His troop always struck me as much more mature.  They also seemed more religious, though they had a large Buddhist population.  The difference between my experience and my brother's experience demonstrates the non-uniformity of Boy Scouts.

I was talking to my brother about scouts, and I found that he was in the Order of the Arrow.  What's that, you ask?  Let me tell you how I knew them.

I knew the Order of the Arrow from the yearly Camporee, when all the scouts in the local district would get together and compete.  The competitions were things like knot-tying, fire-building, whatever.  On one of the nights, they'd get all the scouts up late at night.  We'd walk a long way in the dark, guided by silent people in Native American costumes.  Eventually we'd reach a large field and form an ellipsoid.  More people in Native American costumes and soundmakers attached to their ankles would run around on the inside of the ellipsoid.  Occasionally, they'd stop at a scout, look real closely at their face.  Then they'd either go back to running, or pull out the scout to join the Order of the Arrow.  Those scouts would reappear later the next day, and wouldn't explain what happened.

Really, scouts were nominated beforehand, and the people running around in circles were trying to recognize people in the dark.  I suspected the Order of the Arrow was a glorified alumni association for honored scouts.  But my brother told me that's not what it's like.  In his description, there were a lot of little kids playing tennis, and adults who were crazy enough to dress up as Native Americans.

Then I realized that I had missed yet another problematic aspect of the Boy Scout institution.  There's so much appropriation of Native American culture.  They reinforce the stereotype that Native Americans are just people in headdresses, even though I daresay most actual Native Americans don't go around wearing headdresses.  When the number of scouts who dress up as Native Americans greatly exceeds the number of visible Native Americans, they're just seizing control of an image with little regard to whom the image applies.

Given how widespread the practice is, and how it's propagated among kids who don't know any better, you can expect a lot of people to rationalize it to reduce dissonance.  "No, we try very hard to be respectful of Native American culture."  "If Indians can act white by getting health care, then we can act Indian."

But what do I know?  I'm not Native American, nor am I invested in the scouts.  Obviously, it would be better to hear Native Americans speak for themselves.  A blog called Newspaper Rock has written on the subject numerous times.  It appears that the Boy Scouts are frequently disrespectful of Native Americans, although like most things in the scouts, it is non-uniform.

I liked this cartoon, found on Newspaper Rock.

Reflections on grad school

I am in my second year of a graduate physics program.  Students typically earn their PhD after five or more years.  In a few years, I will be at a completely different stage of research, and have a completely different perspective.  But right now, grad school is still somewhat "new".

My point of comparison is undergraduate university.  I thought undergraduate physics was really easy.  Obviously, I had many classmates who disagreed, which goes to show that my perspective is not necessarily representative.  But that was me.  I do very well in a class environment.  I never had to study for tests because I already understood the material from the time it was mentioned in lecture.

Grad school is not a class environment.  Or at least, not most of it.  I've been taking a few classes every semester, but they are not very important, and the grades don't really matter.  Soon I won't have any more classes to take.  At that point, I'll divert all my attention to research, which is the real centerpiece of physics graduate school.

My impression is that research uses a different set of skills from those used in classes.  It's hard to say exactly what that skill set is, but it includes self motivation, good communication skills, and good paper-reading skill.  For me, this is somewhat of a disappointment, because I may be great in the classroom, but I am only decent at research skills.  'Twas to be expected, since life isn't a series of lectures, but still.  I am most annoyed by all these papers.  There is something to be said for the compact and efficient way that physics papers present information.  But one thing I would not say for papers is that they are welcoming to people who are new to a topic.  I would have a much easier time of it if they were in lecture format.

I came into grad school wanting to do theoretical physics, but now I am doing experimental physics.  That's the way a lot of people do it, actually.  For whatever reason, incoming students' interests skew towards theoretical, even though there is more room in experimental.  An obvious possible cause is that theoretical physics is glamorous.  String theory and cosmology are also glamorous, and thus also overrepresented among incoming students' interests.  I've also heard it suggested that incoming students want to do theoretical physics because most undergraduate work is essentially theoretical.  Students want to do more of the same, and think theoretical research will fit.

Myself, I just liked the idea of solving mathematical puzzles.  I've been a puzzle enthusiast for a long time, as you know.  But I was open to the idea of doing experimental physics.  So I tried it.  And now I see there are a lot of advantages to experimental work.  And the thing is, I still get to solve puzzles!  Last semester, I spent a lot of time trying to explain a feature in our data.  I talked to a theorist about it, and he suggested a direction, but I still had to work out the rest.  It was quite satisfying.  This made me realize, experimentalists will always have an abundant supply of their own problems to solve, and theorists can't solve all of them.

I'm not sure what theoretical physics is like, but I suspect that it is not really much like undergraduate study after all.  They probably have to read lots of theoretical papers, which are like ten times harder to read than experimental papers.  And they probably do most calculations by computer modeling rather than pencil and paper like undergrads do.  And I bet it's more stressful because it's more competitive too.  Or so I imagine.

So yeah, I like where I am.  My advisor fits the "perpetually absent" archetype, which suits me fine.  I've met her several times, and she gives a great pep talk.  Most of the time I just refer to the other grad students and postdocs for help, and they are very helpful.  I have no complaints so far.  Let's see if that changes in a few years!

I used to think Santa was a myth

'Tis the season for anecdotes...

I didn't ever take Santa very seriously when I was younger.  Or at least, not as far as I can recall.  And I thought that no one else took Santa seriously either.

I mean, kids believing in Santa, that's just something that happens in the movies, right?  There are countless movies depicting little kids who believe in Santa Claus.  They'll write letters to Santa.  They'll wait excitedly at the stairs for Santa to come, deliver presents, and eat the cookies and milk.  Kids believe in all these elaborate legends and rituals, sometimes even in the face of disbelief from their parents or older kids.

Of course, in these movies, Santa also happens to be real.  But Santa isn't real.  So why should belief in Santa be real?  For me, belief in Santa was all part of the mythos, along with the elves, reindeer, and red suit.

But some time ago, my dad told me that he and my mother made a conscious decision not to emphasize Santa Claus.  (They also made a decision not to emphasize heaven and hell, but that's another story.)  The reason?  Apparently, one of my uncles had a very negative experience with Santa.  One year, he found out Santa wasn't real, and he broke down crying.  He had a huge tantrum, and IIRC, also questioned the existence of God.

And then the next year, he forgot that Santa wasn't real.  And then he found out again and had another tantrum.

So it turns out that my childhood experience was not identical to other people's childhood experiences.  And plenty of kids really do believe in Santa, as well as the Tooth Fairy.  In a study I found, about 70% of 3-year-olds believe in Santa, as opposed to 78% who believe in the garbage man.  83% of 5-year-olds believe in Santa, and a third of 9-year-olds believe in Santa.

This just boggles my mind.  Next you'll tell me that kids actually write letters to Santa (what does the post office even do with them?), actually leave out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve (don't they go bad?), and parents actually dress up as Santa to fool their children.  This entails a much greater societal investment into the legend than I previously thought.

And what a bizarre legend it is.  Often, it's about the conflict between the believing children and disbelieving adults.  And as the narrative goes, it's the children who are in the right for believing.  Why??  Why is belief for its own sake a value?  It's one thing to claim that it has some value for child psychological development, but I hardly think that the legend has caught the public imagination because of psychological research.

I used to believe we lived in a world where children only believed in Santa in the stories.  That world made much more sense, but now I know that is not the world we live in.  I guess I learned a valuable lesson in critical thinking.

I'm no atheist activist

I am questioning my identity.  No, the other identity.  No, the other other identity.  I'm talking about my identity as an activist for atheism.

Calling myself an activist made a lot more sense when I was running a student organization.  But these days, what is it I do exactly?  I don't go to any protests (I don't like them).  I don't write letters to congressmen, or even to newspapers.  I don't support any atheist organizations.  All I have is this blog, which I really don't think counts.  There is a swarm of atheist blogs already, and I'm pretty sure that this little raindrop is not responsible for the flood.

For some reason, I feel sorry to see my activist identity go.  Maybe it's because I'm doing nothing to help the atheist movement which I know and care about so much.  Personally, I think it is for the much sillier and selfish reason that being an activist greatly boosted my ability to smash stereotypes of atheists.  Nobody could chalk me up as an individual exception; I was a leader.  Never mind how ridiculously elitist that is, or how minor a leader I was.

But reality compels me to say goodbye.  I have started thinking of myself as a radical atheist instead (yes, like Douglas Adams), because it's something I'm still very serious about.  But I am completely incapable of dredging up the will to do anything about it other than a bit of reading and writing.  Pretty much the same boat as most of my readers, which maybe isn't so bad!

On a related note, Cerberus planted a little idea in my head (emphasis mine):

Yes, atheists can, do, and should point out issues in the Religious Right all around the world, both Christian and Muslim, pointing out egregious behavior and making it impossible to hide them from the public eye and public condemnation. To make it easier for people to leave those communities and try to reach those who can break from the oppressive conditions they find themselves in.

But the thing about that is that comes with a lot of downtime.

Cerberus goes on to say that the most important thing to do during this downtime is work on our own community and ourselves.

Well, here I am, in permanent activist downtime.  I'm quite sure that my blog has no real effect on the religious right.  But I am happy to simply participate in this community, and do what little I can there.

Religion-shaped hole: Community

Last time I talked about my experience with one of the "needs" supposedly fulfilled by religion: spirituality.  Now I will talk about another need: community.

I have a very strong need for community.  I did not realize this until college, or perhaps I simply did not feel the need before.

The Catholicism I grew up in did not provide a community, at least not to me.  I have memories of Sundays at church.  We were always late to mass (sometimes my fault), and I did not talk to a single person there.  I suppose there were just too many people, in the hundreds.  The only social interaction occurred at a particular point in mass where everyone exchanged handshakes.  "Peace be with you."  "And also with you."  And then there's the time when everyone holds hands while saying the Our Father.  But that's it.  It was more a ritual than real socializing.

And then there was CCD, which was like Sunday school, but on Wednesdays.  My memories of this are very dim, since it was ages 5-10 (?), but I remember being introduced to the sacraments and doing lots of arts and crafts.  I do not remember meeting any other kids this way.  But then I didn't have any friends period at the time, so perhaps this was my fault and not CCD's fault.

Skipping ahead to college, one of the first things I encountered there were campus ministry organizations.  Before classes even started, someone knocked on our dorm room door and offered us Red Vine (I am a sucker for licorice).  Then she suggested going to someone's room where they would play games.  So I did, along with my roommate.  There were one or two dozen people there, and as we played Mafia I slowly figured out that the organizers were part of the Inter-Varsity Bruin Christian Fellowship.  Some atheists might find it somewhat sinister that this group would "trick" us into coming, but I think it was genuine.  We really did have fun playing games, and they were not pressuring anyone to become further involved.

By then, I no longer identified as Catholic, and my roommate was an apathetic Buddhist, but we were both impressed by the social opportunities it offered.  I have to hand it to them, they knew how to organize a community. They had a variety of subspaces and types of activities.  I didn't like the services because I don't like enthusiastic crowds or singing (not even getting into my disagreement with the sermons), but that was okay because there were plenty other things.  I went to a few barbecues, a few house parties, and a few small group meetings, lots of dining hall dinners, and at one point a play.  Some spaces made me uncomfortable as a non-Christian, so I just learned to avoid those things.  Overall, I enjoyed the activities, and I liked the network of friends I made.

And yet it was definitely suboptimal for an atheist to be using a Christian space, so the next year I more or less stopped meeting new people in the group, and moved on to other things.  One of those things was a student group called the Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists.  Long-time readers know I was president of this group last year.  This was great, for me anyways.  I liked the absurd intellectual discussions, and I liked the collection of eccentric nerds I met.  In all my experience with communities, I have never found one with as high a density of eccentricity as skeptical and atheist groups.  And I like that.  The down-side is that they're terribly organized (I especially felt this way when I was doing the organizing).

And then I became involved in the queer community.  The queer community, I think is more... normal.  They drink and party a lot, and they like pop culture.  They have terrible taste in music, or maybe that's just me.  Nonetheless, I am addicted to queer spaces.

What lessons can we derive from my personal story?  It's hard to generalize, and I'm sure many details are just red herrings.

One lesson is that religion does not always provide for the needs that people say it does.  I have never really felt much of a sense of Catholic community or Catholic culture.  Catholicism is just boring.  I have, on the other hand, found a wonderful community among atheists.  But is this community for everyone, or is it only for eccentrics nerds?  I have a hard time fighting this eccentric culture myself, because it's one of the things I personally enjoy.

The last lesson could be that we don't need to go to the atheist community to have community.  The queer community is plenty secular, for instance.  I'm betting most atheists who need a community simply find other communities that are not explicitly atheistic.  Is there anything wrong with this, besides the fact that it makes atheists less visible?  I honestly can't say there is.

Do any of you have stories about what community means to you?