Belief…

Most people don’t think they’re racist, but when it’s actually tested, virtually everyone is. So all of the decisions you make assuming you’re not racist actually have consequences accordingly. However, if you realize how many unconscious beliefs you have regarding race, and that you’re inevitably going to have misleading cognitive biases on the subject, then it helps you to be more careful about your actions.

Everyone has a belief system, and denying it doesn’t make it go away; it just causes you to make decisions and take actions with less awareness of of the process. And I’m not just talking about spaghetti monsters; I’m talking about coming to terms with the set of a priori assumptions you base your decisions on.

Atheism IS a belief system. For starters, as soon as you make the leap from “no, thank you, actually I don’t believe the evidence supports the existence of a deity of any description at this time” to “I believe there is no deity, and I think it’s better for people to realize this” then it becomes a belief rather than the lack thereof. As soon as you use the term “Atheism” then you’re acquiring a belief system whether you embrace it as such or not. And in reality, Atheism is becoming a more and more organized belief system as increasing numbers of people choose to associate themselves with that label. Personally I’ve called it “scientifickism” for several decades–an attempt to map the values of the scientific method to a more global belief system about how to live life and interact with others. But increasingly people are just calling it “Atheism.”

Conversely, the statements many Atheists make about religion show a stark ignorance of the wealth and variety of “religions” around the world. Granted, it can be hard to understand this given that the very word “religion” was coined in English to refer to a Christian perspective on religion, and that this is surely what they have have had the most exposure to. But there’s a lot more to religion than the qualities that draw the most ire from Atheists, which typically aren’t accurate for all religions, just the ones they’re familiar with.

For example, here are some common myths about religion in general:

• All religions worship deities (not all do)
• Religion forbids contraception (not all religions even address it one way or another)
• Religion operates by inventing threats of divine retribution or eternal damnation to keep people in line (true in many cases but not all)
• Religion causes war (mixing correlation and causation; politics and economics drive war, but belief systems are a powerful tool for leveraging people for purposes including war)
• Religion is homophobic (perspectives on homosexuality vary widely)
• All religions forbid abortion (in fact only a few actually do)

Religion is in many ways a way of grouping together the beliefs, laws and practices of a group of people together. What counts as religion for Christians doesn’t actually touch on nearly as many practices and topics as for Muslims, whereas Zen Buddhists have a much more Spartan (if you’ll excuse the wording) approach. In particular, not all religions disallow contraception, not all religions rely on the Manichaeistic “you’re either good or you’re evil” dualism or on threats of eternal damnation. In fact most religions don’t disallow contraception, and many don’t care one way or another. Similarly, the reality is that in day to day life, the main external pressure for religionists to cooperate with the precepts they follow is the same reason why Ruby on Rails developers tend to use TDD, or why Lindy Hoppers like Jazz music and practice swingouts all the time: a combination of their own personal beliefs (they actually believe these preferences and approaches are better) and peer pressure from the community.

Let’s look at correlation and causation with respect to contraception. It’s worth remembering again that religion didn’t originally develop as a meme that expanded beyond a social group. Most religions in the world are still strongly associated with an ethnic group. Whether you call them religious beliefs, mores, taboos, or cultural practices, the set of beliefs and practices of a community evolve to give those communities an advantage. For example, years ago I read a study of sexual taboos across cultures, and it showed how the taboos correlated with the economic necessities of local environments. Some sexual taboos and customs are designed so that they limit the tribe’s expansion in a limited environment by restricting the timing or frequency of sexual encounters, or through polyandry. That kind of system works especially well in remote locations where immediate tribe expansion isn’t an option–such as on a remote island. However most social systems do the opposite, and in surprising ways–such as outlawing copulation during less fertile parts of the woman’s cycle.

This is “surprising” because while limiting sex might seem to universally reduce pregnancies, in fact limiting sex some of the time can serve to increase it at the crucial moments most likely to cause insemination. Most “religions” are designed to ensure orderly increases in population, by ensuring that (almost) everyone gets a mate, that people procreate extensively, and that the resulting children have two parents (or a similarly fault-tolerant family unit) and a supportive community structure.

Of course once we reach high population levels, religions start to adapt, and a social scientist would expect to see changes in the religions themselves to limit population increases, and even the emergence of new religious systems to adapt to that need. And lo and behold, we have some religions changing their perspectives on population-limiting practices such as contraception (and dare I say, homosexuality and gay marriage), and the emergence of vocal Atheists publicly promoting contraception and abortion.

What’s ironic is that today, the people who are the most successful from a societal perspective–highly educated, high income, etc.–are often the least successful from a biological perspective (eg. “how many grandchildren will they have?”). People living in poor areas without ready access to sex education or birth control methods tend to have a lot more offspring than wealthy urban professionals. The only educated, financially successful people having lots of kids today tend to be religious.

Of course, proliferation doesn’t equal happiness. But if you want to know who will populate the next generations on the earth, it’s the offspring of teenage mothers and devout religious people.

And in that sense, by the only meaningful biological metric of success, religion makes people more successful. That’s why it’s still around.

Now the REAL problem at hand is the Problem of the Commons: it’s to the advantage of every individual person, and even every sub-community, to ensure their own proliferation over that of their rivals. But the world can only handle so many people.

So how do you get the whole world to limit their populations? Traditionally there are two methods:

1. WAR — killing young people at the height of fertility greatly reduces populations.
2. RELIGION — changes to taboos about sex and procreation could make it socially unacceptable to have a lot of kids; in fact religions could evolve to require contraceptive use except in certain situations.

However there’s a third modern option: people who are well-educated and financially secure have fewer kids. In fact, they have so few kids that many first world countries have negative birth rates even though they don’t necessarily suffer from overpopulation in the first place. So with more education around the world, ironically we could end up with dangerously low populations–where there aren’t enough working-age people to support the older generational cohorts.

Therefore what we need is some kind of balance. What if some people believe in using contraception and some don’t? The groups of people not using contraception will tend to expand faster, but over time some will defect to the contraception-using groups and populations will stabilize. After all, there are two strategies at work here: one is to maximize the number of offspring that you have, and the other is to maximize the resources you invest per child.

(There’s the obvious comment here that not all people “want to have children” at all, but I’m talking about evolution here, not strategies consciously employed by individuals. And in any case, with contraception, the people who really don’t want children will be removing themselves from the gene pool in Darwinian fashion, leaving generations of the children of people who chose to have children or were too lazy to grab a condom.)

So perhaps that’s what we need: some people who have a taboo against contraception, and some people who don’t.

Interesting.

What’s so “meta” about this whole exploration is realizing that Atheism is just another belief system serving new sets of needs in the social ecosystem. From one perspective, the “accuracy” of a set of beliefs isn’t nearly as important as the resulting actions of the believers.

Could relationships be the next direction in video games?

Today I had conversations about video game design, women in tech, and the way dating sites work. And I read an article about “romance” in video games, which somehow converged into that one question in my mind.

So far games have improved in terms of graphics, art, representation of the laws of physics, completeness (eg. entire worlds rather than limited sections called “levels”), character complexity, and non-player character (NPC) behaviour. Definitely one of the directions many game designers are trying to pursue is better storytelling and plot, which means better character development and interactions.

What’s more integral to character development and plot than the relationships between characters? Especially in the case of romance. Relationships are what make people keep watching TV shows and care about the characters in books.

They’re also one of the hardest things for a computer to fake.

Perhaps this could also be an area that would particularly benefit from more female involvement in game design, not just because of the stereotypical male tendency to underemphasize the importance of relationships, but also because it might round out the role of women in game romances to more than just objects of desire. It might ensure that romance is seen from a woman’s perspective as well, meaning that the woman is the subject, not the object.

Ultimately the question is how easily it’s possible to pass the uncanny valley of romance, to program a game’s NPC’s to be able to build relationships the way people do.

Links:

1. Does romance enhance video games? http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/02/13/face-off-romance-options/
2. The uncanny valley: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/gaming/2004/06/the_undead_zone.html
   

This poster (you can buy it here) brings up an interesting issue. While I’m not sure that “buy a dictionary” is really a viable alternative [1] to these emotionally triggered terms, it brings up some interesting thoughts.

I think that an important thing to think about is the fact that both of these terms were originally intended to be positive. It’s an example of the euphemism treadmill when we try to dress up something society sees as negative in an effort to put it in a better light. But in reality you need to change people’s view of the thing.

The word gay of course originally meant “happy” and the use of the word to mean “homosexual” was a pretty accepting term in a time and place that was more judgmental (eg. compare “queer). When I was a kid, though, growing in up in a transitional time where acceptance of different sexual orientations by society was in turbulent flux, the word “gay” didn’t mean “homosexual” in school the way most people used it. I’m not saying we didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, but the way kids used it had nothing to do with sexual orientation. In fact when my classmates started using the term, we were still in that early elementary school phase where any kind of sexual activity was considered vaguely gross by our peer group. I didn’t like that use of the word, not because I had any strong feelings of tolerance or intolerance about sexual orientation, but because it just seemed like a bizarre equivalence. I know that the end result for me is that in my head, I’ll forever have “gay” encoded much like other ambiguous words such as “right,” which have one spelling and sound but several distinct and sometimes incompatible meanings–meanings  that in certain cases I need to censor from my speech. A lot like when you’re navigating for someone and they ask, “so I turn left here?” and you remind yourself that answering “right!” is completely unhelpful. I can’t really unlearn the pejorative sense of the word “gay,” but I can at least strip it from my working vocabulary.

Similarly, the term “mentally retarded” was still in vogue when I was in elementary school as a preferred term (succeeding such gems as “idiot,” “slow,” and “mentally deficient.” The term “mentally handicapped” was also on its way to becoming the preferred term and no one was yet using “mentally challenged.” So kids started saying “retarded” to mean “stupid.” And even today, I hear kids saying, “what are you, mentally challenged?” It’s not the terms, it’s the attitude.

That one’s a hard one to fight because, except in the world of politics, intelligence is supposedly a highly prized commodity–even if those of us who grew up as geeks find that hard to believe. But the upshot is that when you teach kids to say “mentally challenged” instead of “stupid,” they don’t so much learn to view a person with clinical mental retardation as a human with extra challenges in the intellectual arena; they rather learn that “mentally challenged” is a funny sounding, grown-up word for “stupid.” Teaching kids to value differences isn’t something that’s magically fixed by pushing new terms for old injuries.

Incidentally, however, it’s possible: as a young kid I was considered “gifted” and yet I used to play with a kid who was “mentally handicapped.” Frankly I never really noticed a difference, or more to the point, he was just as different as everyone else seemed to me.

A few other linguistic excursions into the world of semantic shift:

• Lame – I hated the term “lame” to mean “inferior” or “uncool” when I first heard it as a kid, because it can be unkind to people with physical handicaps. However the use of lame in that sense has also faded out, so it’s less of an issue. And we can still use lame to mean “ineffectual” or “hampered.”
• Jew – As a kid, I was shocked to discover that a small number of people used the term “Jew” to mean “cheapskate” or as a verb to mean “haggle in an aggressive yet petty way” or “cheat someone out of something financially.” In fact I had a number of classmates who literally asked me what the polite, nice term for “Jew” was. They had only ever heard it used pejoratively. It’s a perfect example of how it’s often the attitude that defines the word and not the other way around.
• Gyp – Similarly, the association has been lost over time but to “gyp” someone, meaning to cheat them in a financial sense, comes from the word Gypsy and the association between gypsies, cons and cheating.
• Faygele – In contrast, the Yiddish term “faygele” used to refer to gay men — despite some modern assumptions to the contrary — was not historically a negative term. Similarly to the term “gay” itself, faygele actually means “little bird” [2] and was a term of endearment for a young boy, and by extension a well-intentioned way to refer to an effeminate or gay man. However as the term “fag” came into use in English as a slur, some people made the association and assumed that “faygele” was also a slur, perhaps a deformation of the English word. Fortunately I notice though from the number of people using the word for self-identification on the web that it’s being reclaimed as a more positive term again, which is nice.
• Monkey – [Updated] Following Obama’s re-election, apparently among the inevitable racist slurs, a number of people were comparing him to a monkey. It’s an old racist notion based on the suggestion that Africans are a different species compared with people of Nordic extraction. Part of the irony is that if anything, what makes white people different may be the neanderthal genes, but you don’t see white supremacists proudly declaring “we’re more neanderthal than you folks!” But what’s even more ironic, and perhaps problematic, is that, arguably, acknowledging that “monkey” is a racist slur might help to perpetuate the association. After all, George W. Bush probably holds the record for most monkey comparisons in a presidential term [3]. So it’s not unheard of or unacceptable to compare the president to a monkey as a form of political mockery. I’m not a big fan of this kind of pseudo-political statement, because it’s a blunt use of imagery instead of argument. But it’s literally only racist if you choose to acknowledge that “monkey” is specifically a pejorative reference to a person of African descent, rather than a more general insult.

1. For one thing, the word you’re looking for is thesaurus. For another, people just go online for that kind of thing nowadays. However, if you put those two thoughts together, they cancel themselves out, because Wiktionary is a thesaurus. Also, I’m aware that the point of the poster is to emphasize that there are a dozen or more words to replace the offensive uses, but I’ll also point out that there are times for eloquence and times when we just need a quick, go-to term of dismay. So what we really need isn’t a million words, but just one, and ideally something monosyllabic for the right emotional fit.
2. Here’s a nice Yiddish song that uses faygele in the original sense of little bird:

3. Compare George W Bush Monkey Pictures with Racist Teens Forced to Answer for Tweets.

A Norwegian study quoted in the Telegraph[1] shows a surprising finding: that when couples do equal shares of housework, they’re more likely to get divorced.

What?

Apparently they don’t seem to have much data for situations where men do more housework (*cough*) but when women are doing more dishes and laundry, they say the couples are more likely to stay together.

I think the thing to take away from this study is not that “women should do more housework than men” but that having well-established roles within a relationship is very important, because it makes the relationship less transactional (eg. having to keep track of every unit of work you and your partner do). There’s a concept in business and computer science of a “transaction cost” — for example, if you’re paying a flat fee for shipping whether you order one item or fifty, then it makes sense to bundle purchases. The flat fee is a transactional cost. In general, if you have high transaction costs, you need to reduce the number of transactions.

There’s an emotional transaction cost embedded in relationships where chores are split down the middle. If you’re supposed to do exactly half of each chore that you don’t like, then you’ll spend a lot of time paying attention to whether you’re doing 45% or 55% of the dishes, or the cooking, or scrubbing the toilet. And every time you hit 55%, you have an opportunity to be resentful (or guilty when it hits 45%). It’s very small, but it’s more likely to build up, because that micro-resentment and micro-guilt is what emotionally reminds you to reset the balance.

It also erodes the trust in the relationship. Great relationships are built when two people focus on what they can offer each other. As soon as the relationship focuses too much on trying to get things from the other person, the trust erodes.

On a related note, it’s been shown that being 100% responsible for something allows for a lot more pride in your work than being partly responsible for it [citation needed]. If you really care about having a clean, orderly home, then you’ll get more satisfaction from making it happen the way you want than from trying to share it.

I discovered the importance of dividing tasks in my first business: trying to both do “equal shares” of each category of task was a big failure. There were certain things that neither I nor my business partner wanted to do–such as bookkeeping–and other things that we both enjoyed, such as design work and sales. But when we tried to split those things down the middle, we spent too much time on transaction costs–including just the act itself of switching from one mode to another, like going from accounting to working on a new web design.

In retrospect, that’s one major reason we ended the business partnership. Towards the end, we started to divide up tasks more effectively into bigger categories–such as my business partner handling the entire mailing list, and me handling all of the system administration. The more we moved towards categorized responsibilities instead of per-transaction divisions, the better we worked together.

When it comes to marriage, we tend to focus on avoiding the dynamic popularized in 1950′s America, of men as breadwinners and women relegated to housework. But there’s more than just that in a relationship. Who builds and fixes things around the house? Who decorates? Who seeks out new activities and social opportunities, like a new play that the couple will enjoy watching? Who does accounting, and who figures out why the computer isn’t working?

Aside from the fact that many of those activities also have a gender divide, the point is that in any relationship of two people, the differences in preferences and ability have more importance than outside the relationship. When two people who hate bookkeeping get married, they might just hire a professional, but usually the one who hates numbers and receipts the least becomes the accountant. You might not be great at writing, but if your spouse can’t spell worth a darn, you end up suddenly being the “English expert” of the couple. And when one of the two people is really good at something, it’s even more pronounced: if your partner is a professional accountant, you may never touch the books yourself again.

In fact, it’s been shown that couples actually use each other as auxiliary memory device [citation needed]. If you know that your spouse tends to remember the names of the children of your shared friends, you might get lazy about remember them yourself.

On the negative side, this makes things harder in a break-up: suddenly, after so many years, you have to learn how to do your own accounting again, and for heaven’s sake, what is the name of Charlie’s son again?

Back to the gender divide, studies have shown that men tend to feel more pressure to succeed in their jobs, and women worry more about both housework and how their children are doing[2]. There’s a strong argument to be made that this could be social pressure, but it’s not conclusive, either. And it doesn’t really help a couple just get along.

What’s actually relevant for a couple, though, is that it just works better for the couple if the person who cares more about something is responsible for it. If you split the bookkeeping between the person who doesn’t mind it and the person who hates it, it’s a recipe for resentment.

The best solution is to be honest about what you’re good at, and what you care about. It’s not about traditional roles, but it’s also not about abandoning roles and splitting things down the middle: it’s about each person finding the right role in their own relationship.

1. Couples who share housework are more likely to divorce: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9572187/Couples-who-share-the-housework-are-more-likely-to-divorce-study-finds.html
2. Chore Wars: Housework (almost) evenly distributed in American households, and fathers feeling more pressure: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2084582,00.html

Arabic and Hebrew are the only two languages I know where people greet each other with “PEACE” whenever they meet, which is profound proof that just saying something doesn’t make it happen. It takes DETERMINATION and ACTION.

I just watched the TV show Numb3rs for the first time on Netflix and really liked it. But most importantly there’s a quote from the mathematician character that explains how I often feel about thinking and work:

Charlie Eppes: Please understand, sometimes I can’t choose what I work on. I can’t follow through on a line of thinking just because I want to, or – or because it’s needed. I have to work on what’s in my head. And right now, this is what’s in my head.

– “Uncertainty Principle.” Numb3rs. 2005.

Or to put it another way, it’s like I’ve got an irresponsible genius toddler and an well-meaning idiot adult competing for brain share.

Most people don’t get that. They don’t understand that I can be 10x more intelligent and productive when I’m in the zone, and that if I can’t get into the zone, my work is unbelievably slow and yields mostly crap. Most importantly, they don’t understand how difficult it is for me to change my focus. It’s one of those things that I’ve been working on my entire life, and yet I’m still far below average. I’ve had to learn to organize my life as much as possible to handle that lack of control. For example, I try to put things that have very strict deadlines, or that need to be done regularly and consistently, in the hands of other people. That’s a reason why I really need to run my own business–it’s difficult to have that kind of freedom when someone else is your boss. It’s easy to assume that I just don’t “like” working for other people, but I can and have. It’s just that the quality of my work suffers profoundly in that environment.

Another strategy I use is to give in to wherever the flow takes me. I find that as soon as my brain gets locked onto a problem, I need to ride that as long as I can. Often if I can just take notes on everything I’m thinking, all the really difficult problems get solved, and at a later date my “stupid” but responsible brain can organize it and turn it into real work. And to top it off, just looking at the notes I’ve made can often trigger a return to the zone again for that problem.

In order to safeguard those high-productivity periods, I need to set aside dedicated “no disruption” time. A single brief interruption can unravel all the work I’ve done. For that reason I like to allocate days and times when I don’t respond to email or phone, and don’t check Facebook, for hours or even a full work day. It can be difficult to maintain but the productivity gains are spectacular. Even for people who don’t have difficulties in focusing, this strategy can lead to better productivity.

Most people don’t share this difficulty, but I’ve found that in some of the areas that I’ve worked in–including software development, professional writing and dance–where creative thinking is a major component of the job, there are a higher number of people with similar issues. As I’ve discovered, on the manager’s end, learning to lead a group of creative people that often includes this type of worker can be its own challenge, too. Luckily it’s a problem I know how to handle.

If they’d had these when I was in high school, it would have taken the fun out of the whole computer security explorations phase.

Do rich people really earn their wealth?

In ancient times, kings and nobles made the circular claim that if they had achieved power, it must be because heaven wanted them to be leaders and receive special treatment.

That argument rings hollow in modern society where it’s been replaced by a new refrain: “we worked hard for our money.” It’s a popular phrase in North America where the belief that anyone can be successful with hard work runs rampant through our cultural consciousness. The belief that hard work leads to success is practically a religion. But is it true?

Let’s start by ignoring the people who were born independently wealthy, because there’s no debate there. Instead, let’s look at a billionaire’s claim that since he earned his wealth from scratch, he deserves every penny.

Famous hacker and venture capitalist Paul Graham argues a merit-based perspective. As a renowned programmer himself, he talks about the enormous differences in productivity between programmers. A truly great programmer isn’t just 5% or even 20% better than the other programmers. They may write ten times as much code in the same amount of time. Or since the amount of code written doesn’t really reflect productivity, great programmer can literally create 10 or 20 times the value they’re paid. A single act of brilliance can conceivably save or earn thousands or even millions of dollars.

In contrast, a really bad programmer isn’t worth the salary they’re paid. In fact, they often cause major problems, whether by creating horrendous security flaws, or by introducing so many bugs that every other programmer’s development grinds to a halt as teams try to track down obscure errors that no sane programmer would make.

Grahams point is this: if a programmer can create 10x or even 100x more value, isn’t it fair for them to be paid accordingly? By extension, isn’t it fair for some people to be paid vastly more than others, since a free market economy should take care of setting salaries that are commensurate with contribution?

The answer isn’t simple. Let’s take a maxim from the sports world: “practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.” Or to rephrase it for the business world, “working hard won’t make you successful, doing the right work will.”

That actually underscores the complexity of the wealth issue, because there are two components to “doing the right work.”

The first component is that the work that will get you rich, varies frequently with time and by geographic region. If you worked in the textile industry in India on the eve of the British conquest, you had a shot at a good living because of the English demand for high-quality Indian textiles. But only a few decades later, the Industrial Revolution in England brought the mass manufacture of cheap textiles to the Indian market, impoverishing native artisans.

In the modern world, Bill Gates is a great example of this kind of success. He’s an extremely hard-working, brilliant entrepreneur, but his success depended on a lot of amazing timing, such as being born in just in time to make software for the first personal computers, and being lucky enough to get a wildly advantageous deal with IBM. Warren Buffet is famous for arguing this point:

“If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil … I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well — disproportionately well.”

Amazingly this point was argued extremely well on Cracked.com, by writer David Wong.[1]

As a dance teacher I’ve noticed this as well: what is commonly perceived as talent in dance is very frequently just the happy coincidence that your body naturally moves the way a certain dance style prefers. You might be a “natural” at Tango, but not at Hip Hop. Now, some people have real talent for dance: their brains and bodies adapt well to different styles and ways of moving. But in most cases, our bodies just choose at random a default way to move, and it works better for some situations than others.

In that sense, success requires some amount of hard work, but it still depends a lot on luck.

And it requires even more luck. I mentioned above that Bill Gates was extremely lucky to land an amazing deal with IBM early on. The best entrepreneurs work hard to create luck for themselves, in the sense that they seek out opportunities and learn to adapt. But Hollywood and Silicon Valley both show that extremely talented, hard-working people still need to get a “break” to make it.

But “doing the right work” has a second component that isn’t pure luck.

One of the things that extremely successful people have in common is frequently the willingness to “do anything to win.” If what they enjoy and find easy brings them success, they’ll just work harder at that. But if it doesn’t, they’ll adapt and find a new strategy. Having fun might be important, but it’s not enough.

If someone achieves success by being willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, then success is a choice. It’s the choice to stay at home studying instead of going out to a party. It’s the willingness to work 16-hour days if that’s what is needed. It’s about enjoying pottery but working in real estate because you can make better money that way.

Is wealth just a matter of luck? The final answer is vague: “not entirely.” Hard work and talent are a big factor, and sometimes they’re enough. But for many successful people, luck plays a greater part than they are willing to admit.

Links:

1. http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things-rich-people-need-to-stop-saying/

“Atheists and agnostics are more driven by compassion to help others than are highly religious people” according to this article.

Except that it’s a misleading sentence in an article that’s just bad science. The article tries to suggest that the study demonstrates atheists to be more compassionate and generous than religious people, but in a classic example of misusing data to support an unconnected position, that’s not really what the study says.

What the article and the study it quotes actually reveal, is that religious people base the way they help others, such as giving to charity, on their religious beliefs. They’re not very much affected by emotional appeals. In contrast, atheists react more strongly to emotional appeals, as shown by their greater increase in charity after watching a heart-wrenching video to inspire them.

It’s possible that overall, either atheists or religious people could be more generous or compassionate, but that’s not what this particular study revealed. It really just showed that religion works as advertised.

The ethical role of religion is largely to take the emotional guesswork out of good behaviour. It’s intended to remove the subjective element–the way you might help one old lady across the street because she has a nice smile, but not her dour looking neighbour. Or the way you might give your spare change to the homeless guy who reminds you of your brother, but not to the one who looks like one of the bullies from your high school.

Religions have ethical rules–such as Judaism’s requirement to give 10% of your income to charity, preferably anonymously, or in general the Golden Rule[1]–to emphasize that doing the right thing shouldn’t depend on your mood or whether or not you just watched a sad video.

On a related note, however, other studies[2] have shown that people are more honest shortly after reading the Ten Commandments or similar reminders of ethical behaviour. Interestingly, it’s not about religious belief; it’s about being reminded of what good ethical behaviour is. Where ethical systems can have an effective role is by providing constant reminders of the right thing to do.

It’s fair to criticize religions where they’ve gone astray, advocating hurtful or unethical behaviour. But it’s also important to recognize that the powerful mechanisms of religion are effective in positive ways, too.

1. The Golden Rule was formulated by the great rabbi Hillel as “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” About fifty years later, it was promulgated by a young rabbi of Hillel’s school, who we know today by the name of Jesus, with this formulation: “Do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”
2. See the Ten Commandments study quoted in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

According to Jezebel [1], a few idiots who read the Hunger Games and then saw the film adaptation have been rudely complaining that brilliant young actress Amandla Stenberg was cast in the role of Rue because she’s black, and that’s not how they imagined her. Or similarly the character Thresh, who comes from the same “sector” as Rue. Amazingly, it’s written very clearly in the book that they both have the same “dark brown skin and eyes.”

Apparently the real news is that racists don’t read very well. [2]

In the meantime, the rest of us normal people were quite impressed by Stenberg, who played the part perfectly well.

1. http://jezebel.com/5896408/racist-hunger-games-fans-dont-care-how-much-money-the-movie-made
2. Of course, is that really news?