{"id":2165,"date":"2014-08-22T12:27:03","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T12:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?p=2165"},"modified":"2022-08-26T08:29:23","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T08:29:23","slug":"splenetic-memetic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/2014\/08\/splenetic-memetic\/","title":{"rendered":"Splenetic memetic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a sad story<\/a> I\u2019ve seen repeated on Facebook a couple of times now. Take a moment to read it through. Susan Blackmore<\/a> was invited to give a lecture on memes to the \u201cOxford Royale Academy\u201d – which is not, as she points out, anything to do with the University of Oxford but is Oxforddy enough that you would hope a reasonably enlightened, knowledge-seeking audience would turn up. By the end of the gig, 100 of the audience had walked out, claiming to be offended. Outside the hall, afterwards, she was confronted by some of the walkers-out, and \u201cI was angrily told that I\u2019d made them feel ignorant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, boo-bloody-hoo. I\u2019m with her all the way here. If you don\u2019t like feeling ignorant \u2026 don\u2019t be ignorant.<\/p>\n

The link above is her own account so we only have her own words to go on.<\/p>\n

I called out to some as they left, \u2018Can\u2019t you even listen to ideas you disagree with? In Oxford, of all places, you should be open-minded enough to hear alternative views\u2019. But no. They said I needed an open mind. This really got to me, raising painful memories of my early research on psychics and clairvoyants who said, \u2018You just don\u2019t have an open mind<\/a>,\u2019 when my careful experiments showed no psychic powers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go Susan. Damn right. In Oxford, of all places, you should <\/i>be open-minded enough to hear alternative views. What could possibly have gone wrong?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s assume, for the time being, that memetics actually is science – so, we won\u2019t go there. Assume that it is. Still quoting her own words:<\/p>\n

\u201cI explained the idea of religions as memeplexes: they package up a set of doctrines, tell believers to learn them, to pass them on, to have faith and not doubt, and they ensure obedience with fearsome threats and ridiculous promises. This I illustrated with images of Christian heaven and hell. Then I read from the Koran \u201cthose that have faith and do good works, Allah will admit them to gardens watered by running streams \u2026 pearls and bracelets of gold.\u201d \u201cGarments of fire have been prepared for the unbelievers. They shall be lashed with rods of iron.\u201d More walked out.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A word occurs to me as I read the first line of that quote, and that word is \u201cbollocks\u201d. M\u2019friend Marion independently describes one reason why<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I hasten to add: I can\u2019t deny that what Blackmore describes is a manifestation of some religious beliefs, and a thoroughly vile and unacceptable one at that. And it\u2019s the one that gets the best headlines and makes the best pictures. But if we\u2019re going to be scientific and treat all our data points equally, it\u2019s also very much the exception.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t excuse those who follow their faith mindlessly, even less so when it leads to injuring others. Faith is a force multiplier: put bad into it and it comes out worse; put good into it and it comes out better. But the good – which constitutes the majority of the data – doesn\u2019t get the attention. The minority data might be more visible in society, but then, so are the screaming headlines of the Daily Mail or the Telegraph about immigrants and benefits cheats. Minority data ought not to colour your view of the whole. You certainly shouldn\u2019t go generalising from it.<\/p>\n

Blackmore bases her hypothesis on the outlying data rather than the core, and that\u2019s not how you do science. In science, you base your hypothesis on the core data and then test it against the outliers to see if it still holds. If it doesn\u2019t, you revise the hypothesis. Ultimately you end up with a testable and repeatable hypothesis that enables you, or anyone else, to make predictions on the outcome of similar data elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Under Blackmore\u2019s hypothesis, taking the given data that I am a Christian who had a reasonably middle of the road CofE upbringing, THEREFORE I must follow a moral code purely on fear of the pains of Hell, accept whatever I am taught unquestioningly, deny evolution because it\u2019s not in the Bible, pour all my money into my church (on fear of Hell, again \u2026)<\/p>\n

Funnily enough, I don\u2019t do any of that. And nor do any other Christians I know.<\/p>\n

Blackmore\u2019s hypothesis singularly fails to describe the core data. I say again – I don\u2019t excuse the bad behaviour. I\u2019m not going to try and make out that it doesn\u2019t matter because it\u2019s only a minority, or it\u2019s all a long way from here and mostly affects people with darker skin. Any man\u2019s death diminishes me. But I will say that if such behaviour is caused by memes (cf. provisional disclaimer above), then a more useful study might be made of the memes that make the majority of religious people not <\/i>act in these ways, and perhaps work out ways to tackle the outliers based on that information.<\/p>\n

My own hypothesis, based purely on her own account, is that while some people – the vocal ones – may have walked out because they felt offended, most were just turning their backs on the bad science and the speaker\u2019s obvious contempt for them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s rather a shame that she started this way, because then she says she went onto the blasphemous cartoon business. By the end, she says she was getting good questions. I\u2019m sure she was. I would have liked to be there. As it was:<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the time I arrived at a slide calling religions (Richard\u2019s fault!) \u2018Viruses of the mind\u2019, the lecture hall was looking rather empty.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Richard\u2019s fault? No, ma\u2019am, your <\/i>fault. At no point (I don\u2019t know <\/i>this, I have no empirical evidence, but am prepared to bet up to a reasonable financial limit) did St Richard stand over you with a gun and order you to create a slide labelling religions \u201cViruses of the mind\u201d on pain of death. That was your choice.<\/p>\n

(Though I suppose this could be seen as a self-fulfilling validation of the whole meme idea, and your own theories: that somehow freewill is thrown out of the window and memes simply perpetuate mindlessly because, well, they do. [Isn\u2019t it odd, though, how in just about every other field of science, conducting an experiment on humans in which the testees are aware of the nature of the test is immediately invalidated?])<\/p>\n

To repeat: in Oxford, of all places, you should <\/i>be open-minded enough to hear alternative views \u2026 Unless, apparently, you have decided well in advance that religion is a load of bunkum and proudly backed this up with sub-sixth form strawman arguments, in which case you end up addressing the Oxford Royale Academy and wondering why everything\u2019s going pear-shaped. Based on the rest of her account, I start to question her \u201ccareful experiments\u201d.<\/p>\n

So, in conclusion: the lady set out to deliver what purported to be a scientific talk, using lousy data, rubbish hypotheses, and language that could not have been better calculated to display her own preconceptions and insult people who might have been in the audience.<\/p>\n

And she complains people didn\u2019t want to stay to listen.<\/p>\n

Well, fancy. Religious types, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a sad story I\u2019ve seen repeated on Facebook a couple of times now. Take a moment to read it through. Susan Blackmore was invited to give a lecture on memes to the \u201cOxford Royale Academy\u201d – which is not, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,225],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2165"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3789,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165\/revisions\/3789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}