Two score and three Weekly Link Roundups ago, our founding bloggers brought forth on this blog, a new blog series, conceived in entertainment, ordered by my preference for what I like best, and dedicated to the proposition that links to articles on the web that I found worth reading should be documented on this blog. Now we are engaged in a great fact war, testing whether people will recognize that I don’t necessarily agree with everything said by these links. (If you want to know whether I support a particular opinion you see, feel free to ask.)

• Guessing the Teacher’s Password: “There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says ‘light is made of waves’, and the teacher says ‘What is light made of?’, and the student says ‘Waves!’, the student has made a true statement. That’s only fair, right? We accept ‘waves’ as a correct answer from the physicist; wouldn’t it be unfair to reject it from the student? Surely, the answer ‘Waves!’ is either true or false, right?”
• Can You Prove It Didn’t Happen? Progressive Religion and the Standards of Evidence: “I could, in the next fifteen minutes, come up with half a dozen beliefs that aren’t contradicted by evidence but that also aren’t supported by any. The universe was created by a cosmic graffiti artist, and the Big Bang was the result of her spray can exploding under pressure. Cats talk to each other in Sanskrit — but only when nobody’s listening. Gravity is caused by hundreds of tiny invisible demons inside every physical object, pulling towards each other with a magical force field. Etc., etc., etc. [...] Why are any of these hypotheses any less plausible than any of the commonly- held God hypotheses actually believed by millions of people? Why do they have any less gravitas?”
• Compassion Made Easy [NYTimes]: “As a social psychologist interested in the emotions, I long wondered whether this spiritual understanding of compassion was also scientifically accurate. Empirically speaking, does the experience of compassion toward one person measurably affect our actions and attitudes toward other people? If so, are there practical steps we can take to further cultivate this feeling? Recently, my colleagues and I conducted experiments that answered yes to both questions.”
• Things Christians Say to Explain Away Biblical Moral Atrocities: “Upon reading this horrifying account, properly functioning, minimally moral people would immediately judge the massacre in Roumidia to constitute a moral atrocity. We wouldn’t even dignify their claim for moral justification with a moment’s serious consideration. This is where things get perplexing, because countless Christians will suddenly shelve the skepticism when it comes to reading accounts of similar atrocities in the Bible. As surely as they dismiss any claim for moral justification to the Roumidian village slaughter, so they dismiss any possible claim against moral justification for things like the Israelite slaughter of the Canaanites. What do Christians say to explain this curious double standard? Let’s consider a few examples that have appeared in recent days in the blog.”
• The Mind of a Flip Flopper [NYTimes]: “Forget for a minute everything you know about politics. Barack Obama now openly supports gay marriage. Mitt Romney now opposes roughly the same kind of health care reform he fought for as governor of Massachusetts. What if they weren’t two politicians calculating how to win an election but instead just two guys who changed their minds? They didn’t ‘flip-flop’; they experienced, as social scientists say, an attitude change, the way any of us do when we become a vegetarian or befriend a neighbor we used to hate or even just choose to buy a new brand of toothpaste.”
• How Confrontationalism Can Open Doors: “A woman walks into a café, orders a coffee and, before she pays, crosses off “In God We Trust” on her $20 bill. The woman is me, and scratching the motto off money is something I often do. This time the woman behind the counter gave me a look. [...] I felt uncomfortable. [...] Was it obnoxious of me to do my little ‘ secular government’ visibility action in front of the barista, who is professionally required to be polite to me and doesn’t have the option of telling me to piss off? In doing my visibility shtick and trying to open some eyes to some new ideas and questions, had I instead just closed a door? Here’s what happened next. The woman came back with my coffee and said, ‘If you don’t mind my asking—why do you do that?’ And the door opened.”
• Ultimate Responsibility: “How does ‘responsibility’ enter the causal chain? Compatibilists may say it emerges from “reasons responsiveness” or rational agency. Past states of the world cause my cognitive functioning — that is, me — to exist, and I in turn cause downstream effects to occur through my actions, for which I am responsible. Responsibility enters the system when the causal chain flows through an agent — through one’s character, values, and practical reasoning. Incompatibilists object to this: ‘how can you be responsible for your actions if you weren’t responsible for the upstream causes which determined your cognitive functioning (character, etc.) in the first place?’ They claim, in short, that responsibility requires ultimate responsibility. But is this even possible?”
• Development Controversy a Sign of Sophistication: “The striking shift here is not in the details or merits of the specific programs, but in that these rows happen at all. They are precisely how science is supposed to work. [...] International development has become much more scientific in the last 15 years: evaluating ideas through randomized control trials; publishing enough detail about a program’s methods and results that it can be replicated elsewhere; subjecting analysis to peer review; and publishing in respected journals. The organizations whose data are being contested should be proud that their data are capable of such contest. They contrast starkly with much activity in charities, philanthropy, and even social policy where performance data are often too scarce, too private, too vague, and/or otherwise too flaky to be meaningfully debated.”
• Stop Bullying the “Soft” Sciences: “Once, during a meeting at my university, a biologist mentioned that he was the only faculty member present from a science department. When I corrected him, noting that I was from the Department of Psychology, he waved his hand dismissively, as if I were a Little Leaguer telling a member of the New York Yankees that I too played baseball. There has long been snobbery in the sciences, with the “hard” ones (physics, chemistry, biology) considering themselves to be more legitimate than the “soft” ones (psychology, sociology). It is thus no surprise that many members of the general public feel the same way. But of late, skepticism about the rigors of social science has reached absurd heights.”
• The Use and Abuse of Religious Freedom: “When people are prohibited from practicing their religion – for example, by laws that bar worshiping in certain ways – there can be no doubt that their freedom of religion has been violated. Religious persecution was common in previous centuries, and still occurs in some countries today. But prohibiting the ritual slaughter of animals does not stop Jews or Muslims from practicing their religion. [...] Neither Islam nor Judaism upholds a requirement to eat meat. [...] Restricting the legitimate defense of religious freedom to rejecting proposals that stop people from practicing their religion makes it possible to resolve many other disputes in which it is claimed that freedom of religion is at stake. For example, allowing men and women to sit in any part of a bus does not violate orthodox Jews’ religious freedom, because Jewish law does not command that one use public transport. It’s just a convenience that one can do without – and orthodox Jews can hardly believe that the laws to which they adhere were intended to make life maximally convenient. Likewise, the Obama administration’s requirement to provide health insurance that covers contraception does not prevent Catholics from practicing their religion. Catholicism does not oblige its adherents to run hospitals and universities.”
• Why is It So Hard to Get the Fundamentals Right?: “And then he’s off into riffs on Romney’s various problems. He’s not a ‘natural candidate.’ He didn’t air enough positive ads to make voters ‘comfortable’ with him. He should have taken Rubio’s position on immigration to win Latinos. He shouldn’t be having a discussion of Medicare. Maybe those things are true. Or maybe the economy just doesn’t predict that Obama should be losing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: many an unduly complicated interpretation of an election began with a misreading of the fundamentals. Fortunately, I don’t need to say much more.”