Apathy

In fact, just two years ago, I used to be a very apathetic person. I even wrote an article on apathy. Though the article does not explicitly mention social or political issues, that was the implication.

Due to my apathy, I managed to blog for 3 years without a single direct mention of religion or politics. Mainly, I was following the social norm in which it is discouraged to discuss such things. In addition, such things never had any negative impact on me. Even as an atheist in Texas (thankfully Austin is a liberal city), I never felt discriminated against, nor had I ever seen firsthand what religious discrimination looked like. As for the broader social issues, I was pro-choice, for example, but never cared about enough to raise it in a discussion, nor did I realize at the time how connected it was to religion.

Things didn’t really change when I went to college. Cornell is just as liberal, if not more liberal, than the city of Austin, and thus I never felt any push. In fact, the apathy article I wrote was during my first year of college.

So what caused the change?

It started last August with a debate about motivation. I was shocked when my opponent claimed that the ONLY motivation there is to do good in this life is the promise of reward in the afterlife. More strongly, he claimed that his only motivation to do anything at all is rooted in the afterlife.

Being the logic-focused debater that I am, I wanted to test whether he really stood by that claim. So I asked, “What if there is no afterlife?”

His response: He would commit suicide.

That was the first time I had ever heard that line of thought. It was the game-changer for me. Before that, I had never realized how much irrationality could hurt someone or distort their views.

Later, even when discussing topics that were not religion or politics, I realized how much of a pain it was to argue with someone who would not listen to reason, would not look at the facts, and would not use logic. Upon noticing these signs, I wondered if this person was only irrational for this particular debate or if he got that from somewhere else, which I had suspected. So asked this person whether they believed the Earth was created in six days. The answer was yes.

Given that the context of this was a policy decision (of something rather minor), I suddenly had great concern about policy decisions of things that actually matter. Only then did I realize just how many members of Congress were creationists. (This was 3 months before the 2012 election.) Shortly after, I found out the shockingly low proportion of nonreligious people in Congress. From data slightly later, the nonreligious, who comprise 19.6% of the US population, have not a single member in Congress.

After that, I started realizing many other things. For example, I realized how closely (and negatively) correlated religion was to modern-day social progress (in particular on same-sex marriage and abortion). I learned about the modern status of religion in some of the theocratic states of the Muslim world, and how dangerous it is for non-Muslims (both Christians and atheists) to live there.

Due to my apathy, I had previously thought of Richard Dawkins as a hateful preacher of atheism who was “just as bad” as evangelists. Not because I had actually read any of his books, but because that’s what the (even-liberal) media portrays him as. I started watching some lectures/talks on Youtube, with notable speakers such as Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. I learned that they weren’t the hateful, mean people who they were misconstrued by popular opinion to be, but rather, some very intelligent, logical people who tell it as it is.

I watched Bill Maher’s documentary (Religulous) as well as Richard Dawkins’ (The Root of All Evil?) and was shocked at how absurd and dangerous people’s religious beliefs can really be. As someone who cares about the future of humanity, I was highly disturbed by this particular interview.

Last, but not least, I read this article called “Evangelical Apathy,” by Miri Mogilevsky. It makes a strong case against apathy in today’s world:

I’ve found that in my personal life, I tend to have a much harder time getting along with these people than I do with conservatives. With the latter, while we disagree, we can have a good time debating each other or at least bond over our mutual concern for what’s going on in the world. But with evangelical apathists, the very fact that I care about stuff seems like a thorn in their side.

Interestingly enough, this applies to my previous post, “Religious Logic: Fundamentalists vs Moderates/Liberals,” in which I defended fundamentalists for actually caring about other people, whereas many religious liberals seem to simply take on the most convenient view and bash fundamentalists and atheists alike.

Anyway, that is my answer to why I care. I care about politics and religion because I care about humanity.

Disclaimer: I am an atheist and would be the last person to try to justify religion’s countless atrocities and impediments of social progress. However, this article was written to give a different perspective of religious fundamentalism, especially on the liberal criticism of conservatives or fundamentalists for taking things too far.

Disclaimer 2: This article is written with Christianity in mind. Many of the arguments do not apply to other religions due to the specific position of Christianity in the US.

Fundamentalists Hold More Consistent Worldviews than “Moderates” and “Liberals”

First, consider the following thought experiment. You’re standing in the middle of a highway, with no cars around. However, there are two people standing on the curb. They both think that a giant truck is going to appear out of nowhere and slam into you, killing you. However, you don’t think such a truck is going to appear.

One of the people on the side is more “respectful” of your beliefs, and just lets you stay in the middle of the highway, even though he sincerely believes you will be run over any minute. The other person, also sincerely believing you will be run over, starts yelling at you to get off of the highway. When you ignore her, she runs into the highway and shoves you out of the way. Which is the better person?

Of course, given that both of them sincerely thought you would be run over, the person who tried to save you (even by knocking you over) is a more sympathetic person.

In case the analogy wasn’t clear, the highway can be thought of as some path of sin, the truck is Hell, the onlooker who did nothing is the moderate or liberal religious person, and the one who yelled and shoved you out of the way is the fundamentalist.

I hate to support even a tiny aspect of the Westboro Baptist Church, but you gotta consider the situation from their perspective. They are being very logical, given what they think to be true. Remember that in a logical argument, one makes axioms (aka. hypotheses, assumptions, premises) and deductions (or a deduction system), and then draws a conclusion. Of course, even if the logical deductions are perfect, the conclusion can be nonsense if the assumptions are false. I would guess that their logic is something like this:

• Premise 1: The Bible is true.
• Premise 2: It is good to save people from horrible things.
• Result 1: From Premise 1, homosexuality is a sin.
• Result 2: From Premise 1 and Result 1, one burns in Hell for being homosexual.
• Result 3: From Premise 1, Hell is the worst possible punishment.
• Result 4: From Result 3 and Premise 2, it is good to save people from Hell.
• Conclusion: From Result 2 and Result 4, it is good to stop people from being homosexual.

The reason this is a bad argument is that Premise 1 is obviously false (at least, obviously to atheists).

However, I know some Christians who consider themselves moderate/liberal, yet still trust main points in the Bible (such as the concept of hell and that homosexuality is a sin), even if they do not interpret it literally.

So if you are in this group, my question to you is, why do you NOT actively try to save people? Again, I am nonreligious and I think the Bible is absurd; however, if you believe in heaven and hell, and if you believe that a certain behavior from your friends is going to send them to hell, and if you value that friendship, then why are you NOT trying to guide them away from hell?

I can think of a few possible answers for this:

1. You are secretly nonreligious, and are afraid due to social/economic concerns to come out.
2. You actually do NOT accept concepts from the Bible like heaven and hell, or sin.
3. You actually hate people and want them to go to hell.
4. You can’t do simple logic.
5. You never spent time thinking about these things, and only go with the flow. For example, you only support things like gay marriage because it’s the popular thing to do, not because you came to the conclusion from a rational perspective. (In this option, you can still support the concepts of heaven/hell and sin, be a supporter gay marriage, and be good at logic—it just didn’t occur to you to actually apply logic to this situation. This could be due to social norms.)
6. You can both keep the idea that homosexuality is a sin, and at the same time support gay marriage by using doublethink/cognitive dissonance.
7. You are mentally ill.

In any case, #1 is easily understandable  #4, #6, and #7 we cannot really do anything about. #5  just means you should think about the issue some more (or at all). #3 means you are a sociopath. And if it is #2 for you, then why are you still a Christian? (Though the answer to that might tie in with #1.)

Going back to the truck analogy, why would the passive onlooker NOT try to get you off the road? The corresponding bullets:

• He does not actually believe that a truck will appear and kill you, thus it would be absurd to try to shove you off the road.
• He believes some aspects of the truck myth, but believes that a the truck is benevolent (for example) and will not injure you.
• He wants you to be run over by the truck.
• He cannot conclude that saving you is the correct move.
• He was brought up in a household/society where it is a social norm to NOT warn people of oncoming trucks, and to NOT try to shove people out of the way, even if it saves their lives, and he has not questioned those norms yet.
• He used doublethink to simultaneously believe that it is correct to save you from being run over and that it is correct to not save you from being run over.
• He is mentally ill.

On the contrary, fundamentalists at least speak and act on what they think is right. After all, if you really believe that some sinful action will lead someone to hell, then isn’t the right thing to stop them from doing that? Again, I am against the views and actions of the WBC (e.g. I support marriage equality), but the way they come to their views makes a lot more sense than how many liberal Christians arrive at the opposing views. Here is a WBC member speaking in a Russell Brand interview (1:39):

He seems like a nice person but is just playing with the wrong set of facts. Of course, immediately after the statement the audience starts laughing, but did they even catch the logic, let alone understand it? I know it might be comedy for them, but to solve the issue we need to understand what the other side is thinking.

This is one of the qualms I have with religious liberals. When a fundamentalist does or says something bad, religious liberals are quick to defend their own beliefs by calling out the fundamentalist, with sayings like, “He’s not a true Christian,” or “He is misinterpreting the Bible.” This is absurd, since fundamentalists are taking the most literal interpretation of the Bible, taking it as the word of God, and are in a sense the most Christian.

Instead of addressing the root cause (the Bible and its outdated, barbaric myths), Christian liberals blame the fundamentalists for taking the book too far, yet they themselves never criticize the book. So what they do instead is cherry-pick the currently convenient quotes from the book. In other words, they are the ones deciding which laws from the book are moral and which are not. Does this not directly contradict their belief that morals come alone from God? At least the fundamentalists are consistent about it. And, by not criticizing the book, religious liberals are only helping fundamentalists to impede social progress. (On the other hand, atheist authors like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins directly criticize the Bible/Quran/etc.)

I challenge religious moderates and liberals to re-examine your views—both religious and social views. Are they really consistent with each other? Do they contradict each other? If so, how can you proudly embrace both?

I want you to show your true colors.

An XPS 13 (left) and an Alienware M17x (right).

For a size comparison, that is a Galaxy S3 sitting in front of the Alienware. The XPS 13 weighs 3.0 lbs, while the Alienware weighs 9.4 lbs. Below are the specs of the XPS 13 (and here is a link to the Alienware specs):

Model	Dell XPS 13
Picture
Bought	May 2013
Purchase Cost	$575
Processor	Intel Core i5 3317U @ 1.7 GHz
RAM	4 GB (2×2 GB)
Primary Storage	128 GB Solid State Drive
Graphics Card	Intel HD Graphics 4000
Operating System	Windows 8
Screen (Resolution)	13.3″ HD Widescreen (1366×768)
Wireless	Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235

When Christians become a ‘hated minority’

This is nonsense. 73% of the United States is Christian, and that is a deeply entrenched majority.

Neither are they hated: 90.3% of the US Congress is Christian. If anything, Christians comprise an over-represented sect of government. Who is the real voiceless minority? The Unaffiliated, at 19.6% of the general US population, comprise 0% of Congress.

Evangelical Christians say they are the new victims of intolerance – they’re persecuted for condemning homosexuality.

Intolerance of intolerance is not intolerance. If you don’t want to be criticized for condemning homosexuality, then stop condemning homosexuality. “The KKK say they are the new victims of intolerance – they’re persecuted for condemning blacks.”

A Laughable Comparison

…a new victim: closeted Christians who believe the Bible condemns homosexuality but will not say so publicly for fear of being labeled a hateful bigot.

Perhaps because using the Bible to condemn homosexuality makes you precisely that: a hateful bigot. It is funny how the term “closet” has turned around here.

The conservative media culture is filled with stories about evangelicals being labeled as “extremists” for their belief that homosexuality is a sin.

Yet they pick and choose their sins. It would be universally considered fundamentalist, for instance, if one were to express their belief that wearing clothes of mixed fabrics is a sin (Deuteronomy 22:11).

“It’s easier to just go along,” says Carter, who is also author of “How to Argue Like Jesus.” “You don’t want to be lumped in with the bigots. That’s a powerful word.”

It’s a powerful word because it describes a detestable attribute.

“They are incapable of comprehending that someone may have a view different than theirs,” Johnson says. “For them anyone who dares to question the dogma of the tribe can only be doing so out of hatred.”

This was said in reference to supporters of homosexuality, I kid you not. If only those who condemned it would listen to their own advice.

Some evangelicals say Christians can’t change their view of biblical truth just because times change. But some scholars reply:

Sure you can. Christians do it all the time.

Denying a woman’s ability to preach in church was justified by scriptures like 1 Timothy 2:11-12 – “… I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”

No further comment needed on this one. I actually didn’t believe the quote was true, but apparently it’s actually there.

Until the debate over homosexuality is settled – if it ever is – there may be plenty of evangelical Christians who feel as if they are now being forced to stay in the closet.

Oh no! How will society function without bigotry? How will I live my day without condemning others for their way of life?

	Old	New
Model	Dell Studio XPS 16	Dell Alienware M17x R4
Picture
Bought	April 2010	April 2013
Purchase Cost (Approx.)	$1400	$1400
Processor	Intel Core i5 M430 @ 2.27 GHz	Intel Core i7 3630QM @ 2.4 GHz
RAM	4 GB (2×2 GB)	12 GB (4 GB, 8 GB)
Primary Storage	128 GB Solid State Drive	256 GB Solid State Drive
Graphics Card	ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670, 1 GB	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675m, 2 GB
Operating System	Windows 7	Windows 8
Screen (Resolution)	15.6″ FHD Widescreen (1920×1080)	17.3″ FHD Widescreen (1920×1080)
Wireless	Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200	Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300

This table is in the format of my previous one (2010) when I got the Studio XPS.

The main reason I got the Alienware is that I am moving to a 2-laptop setup. Instead of having one computer for everything, I am planning to have one for performance (Alienware) and one for portability (XPS 13). The problem before was that the Studio was heavy and not convenient to carry around. The new setup solves this problem of portability while still having high performance.

For instance, one of our projects was to implement the above with fully functional logic circuits. If anyone is wondering, this diagram outlines the high-level design of a pipelined computer processor. We then wrote some assembly code to run on this processor, specifically to compute the stopping time of the hailstone function.

As a result of the CS workload, I haven’t had much time to do math—my math blog has not been updated since March.

Anyway, this has been my busiest semester yet at Cornell. Now that classes are over, I will get back into a weekly posting schedule.

Being an introvert in almost every way, I wasn’t expecting to learn too much about my own behavior from the book. Indeed, the personality descriptions and key features of introversion are mentioned in the book. There was, however, still much to learn about introversion vs extroversion from a societal perspective.

What got me interested in the book was a line from Amazon’s interview:

Q: Why did you write the book?
A: For the same reason that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Introverts are to extroverts what women were to men at that time–second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent. Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts, and many introverts believe that there is something wrong with them and that they should try to “pass” as extroverts. The bias against introversion leads to a colossal waste of talent, energy, and, ultimately, happiness.

I had never thought about this before. After all, introversion is almost a societal taboo: from the first day of school to the last day of one’s job, there are boundless social encouragements to be an extrovert—or at least to pretend to be an extrovert. I’ll go through some of the book’s main results.

The Team Environment

One of the most interesting points of the book is that extroverts are overrated in teamwork skills. Cain relates a game called the Subarctic Survival Situation, given to incoming students at the Harvard Business School. Individuals within a team are supposed to rank the items in a list of tools based on which would be the most important for survival in a freezing condition. Then the team can collaborate and come up with a team ranking. If the team ranking is better than every individual’s ranking, the team is said to have synergy and be successful. Otherwise, if one person on the team had a better individual ranking than the team ranking, it means the team did not cooperate well enough.

In this game, those who were the most assertive (i.e. the extroverts) dominated the discussions. As a result, sometimes when one person who may have had tons of wilderness experience speaks too softly, they are ignored and the team fails. An interview with a participant in the game:

“Our action plan hinged on what the most vocal people suggested,” recalls the classmate. “When the less vocal people put out ideals, those ideas were discarded. The ideas that were rejected would have kept us alive and out of trouble, but they were dismissed because of the conviction with which the more vocal people suggested their ideas. Afterwards they played us back the videotape, and it was so embarrassing.” (50)

Here are more unsurprising results:

If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed. Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens. We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate. In one experiment in which two strangers met over the phone, those who spoke more were considered more intelligent, better looking, and more likable. (51)

And yet more:

All of this would be fine if more talking were correlated with greater insight, but research suggests that there’s no such link. In one study, groups of college students were asked to solve math problems together and then to rate one another’s intelligence and judgment. The students who spoke first and most often were consistently given the highest ratings, even though their suggestions (and math SAT scores) were no better than those of the less talkative students. These same students were given similarly high ratings for their creativity and analytical powers during a separate exercise to develop a business strategy for a start-up company.  (51)

In addition, Cain cites studies which show that extroverts and introverts both make good leaders, but of different people. Extroverts were more effective when leading passive types, that is, those who did their job without exercising initiative. However, introverts were more effective when leading those who did actively try to improve work performance. This makes sense. Those who are more passive may need extra guidance, while those who take initiative don’t need to be bogged down by micromanagement.

The style of “groupthink” took its own chapter: “When Collaboration Kills Creativity.” Study after study show that ideas might be better if extroverts weren’t so overvalued.

Physiological Differences

Cain cites the work of Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist, who was able to successfully predict whether babies would turn into extroverts or introverts based on reactiveness.  Counterintuitively, it was the high-reactive who became introverts. It makes sense though, as the high-reactive are more moved by external stimuli, while the low-reactive are unfazed. Hence the low-reactives are the extroverts: they handle unfamiliar social situations with calm, while the high-reactives tend to stay away from such situations.

Some of the evolutionary principles behind the different behaviors are also explored.

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we’re about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator’s eye. (107)

The difference can be detected even in something as innocuous as noise sensitivity:

In another famous study, introverts and extroverts were asked to play a challenging word game in which they had to learn, through trial and error, the governing principle of the game.  While playing, they wore headphones that emitted random bursts of noise.  They were asked to adjust the volume of their headsets up or down to the level that was “just right.”  On average, the extroverts chose a noise level of 72 decibels, while the introverts selected only 55 decibels.  When working at the volume that they had selected—loud for the extroverts, quiet for the introverts—the two types were about equally aroused (as measured by their heart rates and other indicators).  They also played equally well.

When the introverts were asked to work at the noise level preferred by the extroverts, and vice versa, everything changed.  Not only were the introverts over-aroused by the loud noise, but they also underperformed—taking an average of 9.1 trials rather than 5.8 to learn the game.  The opposite was true for the extroverts—they were under-aroused (and possibly bored) by the quieter conditions, and took an average of 7.3 trials, compared with the 5.4 they’d averaged under noisier conditions. (124)

Thinking

How do introverts and extroverts compare on academic tasks?

Introverts’ disinclination to charge ahead is not only a hedge against risk; it also pays off on intellectual tasks. Here are some of the things we know about the relative performance of introverts and extroverts at complex problem-solving. Extroverts get better grades than introverts during elementary school, but introverts outperform extroverts in high school and college. At the university level, introversion predicts academic performance better than cognitive ability. One study tested 141 college students’ knowledge of twenty different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that introverts knew more than the extroverts about every single one of them. Introverts receive disproportionate numbers of graduate degrees, National Merit Scholarship finalist positions, and Phi Beta Kappa keys. (167)

The following contains what I found to be perhaps the most significant result:

Introverts are not smarter than extroverts. According to IQ scores, the two types are equally intelligent. And on many kinds of tasks, particularly those performed under time or social pressure or involving multitasking, extroverts do better. Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload. Introverts’ reflectiveness uses up a lot of cognitive capacity, according to Joseph Newman. On any given task, he says, “if we have 100 percent cognitive capacity, an introvert may have only 75 percent on task and 25 percent off task, whereas an extrovert may have 90 percent on task.” This is because most tasks are goal-directed. Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going.

This speaks very true for me.