Some background of teenage pregnancies in Texas:

The non-Hispanic white rate is 60 per 1,000, the black rate is 130 per 1,000 and the Hispanic rate is 145 per 1,000.

The rate at YFZ seems to be 45 per 1,000. Twenty[-five] percent lower than the rate for other Texas girls in the polygamous girls’ demographic cohort and more than [68%] lower than among Hispanic girls in Texas.

That indicates that underage girls at YFZ are 20 percent less likely to have sex than other white girls across the state and 60 percent less likely to have sex than Hispanic girls across the state.

The rate of teen pregnancy at YFZ is lower than the rate of teen pregnancy in more than three-quarters of Texas counties.

The best thing the state can do now is apologize. If they are sincere in wanting to protect teenaged women from getting pregnant, they ought to take lessons from YFZ, because they are doing a better job of it than the state as a whole.

In the majority of these cases the male was only a few years older than the female (i.e. the male partner was also a teenager).

And, I love that this is an international "law" argued to prohibit polygamy:

Polygamous marriage contravenes a woman’s right to equality with men, and can have such serious emotional and financial consequences for her and her dependents that such marriages ought to be discouraged and prohibited. The Committee notes with concern that some States parties, whose constitutions guarantee equal rights, permit polygamous marriage in accordance with personal or customary law. This violates the constitutional rights of women… (qtd. in ACLRC, 2004: 9). (Canadian blogger)

In the inbetween moments these last few days, I've caught up on some truly great blogs I'd neglected this year.

I present to you my single favorite post I'd missed...I'm a lot like its author; I highly value the style he sketches, and I want to learn to do it more widely,

I have a problem.  It's the way I talk.  I speak in full sentences.(more)

[updated w/ youtube links]

SONG: 1. "Portions for Foxes" (*Lorelai!) 2. "Girlfriend" * (as featured in Big Love!) 3. "The Jeep Song" (*Veronica!) 4. "The Needle Has Landed" *

LBUM: 1. Pinkerton * (had to eventually become my most played...yay Orientalism!) 2. Forever *  (best youtube comment: What the hell is a PGP key?) (this album is still universally overlooked as "obviously" a band's greatest triumph...as Pinkerton once was)

WHOLE CORPUS: The National * (a band I've known for maybe a year; thanks to willmagic) 

JUST THEIR RECENT WORK: 1. Her Space Holiday (The Young Machines, the remix album, and The Past Presents the Future) 2. Ben Lee (Awake Is The New Sleep and Ripe)

INCREASINGLY CONVINCED spans the best career in world history: R.E.M. *

SEXY STARBUCKS GIRL: A Fine Frenzy

SUDDENLY STARTING TO APPRECIATE after years of exposures: Pinback *



HONORABLE MENTIONS that I keep enjoying surprisingly more as this decade goes on: Aqua, Frank Black, Bjork, Blink-182, Counting Crows, Ben Folds, Jesus & Mary Chain, Kent, Ladytron, The Magnetic Fields, Panic! At The Disco, Regina Spektor, the new TMBG (now "The Else"), TV On The Radio, Young Galaxy

The WashPost transcribed an excellent Sam Harris talk -- in which he argues against using his own most famous label! Highlights:

The (main) problem is that the (social) concept of atheism imposes upon us a false burden of remaining fixated on people’s beliefs about God and remaining even-handed in our treatment of religion. But we shouldn’t be fixated, and we shouldn’t be even-handed. In fact, we should be quick to point out the differences among religions, for two reasons:

First, these differences make all religions look contingent, and therefore silly. Consider the unique features of Mormonism, which may have some relevance in the next Presidential election. Mormonism, it seems to me, is—objectively—just a little more idiotic than Christianity is. It has to be: because it is Christianity plus some very stupid ideas. For instance, the Mormons think Jesus is going to return to earth and administer his Thousand years of Peace, at least part of the time, from the state of Missouri. Why does this make Mormonism less likely to be true than Christianity? Because whatever probability you assign to Jesus’ coming back, you have to assign a lesser probability to his coming back and keeping a summer home in Jackson County, Missouri. If Mitt Romney wants to be the next President of the United States, he should be made to feel the burden of our incredulity. We can make common cause with our Christian brothers and sisters on this point. Just what does the man believe? The world should know. And it is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing even to most people who believe in the biblical God.

The second reason to be attentive to the differences among the world’s religions is that these differences are actually a matter of life and death. There are very few of us who lie awake at night worrying about the Amish. This is not an accident. While I have no doubt that the Amish are mistreating their children, by not educating them adequately, they are not likely to hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings. But consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians often complain that atheists, and the secular world generally, balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our Christian neighbors, even the craziest of them, are right to be outraged by this pretense of even-handedness, because the truth is that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time.And the world must wake up to this fact. Muslims themselves must wakeup to this fact. And they can.

Atheism is too blunt an instrument to use at moments like this. It’s as though we have a landscape of human ignorance and bewilderment—with peaks and valleys and local attractors—and the concept of atheism causes us to fixate one part of this landscape, the part related to theistic religion, and then just flattens it. Because to be consistent as atheists we must oppose, or seem to oppose, all faith claims equally. This is a waste of precious time and energy, and it squanders the trust of people who would otherwise agree with us on specific issues.

I’m not at all suggesting that we leave people’s core religious beliefs, or faith itself, unscathed—I’m still the kind of person who writes articles with rather sweeping titles like “Science must destroy religion”—but it seems to me that we should never lose sight of useful and important distinctions.

Another problem with calling ourselves “atheists” is that every religious person thinks he has a knockdown argument against atheism.We’ve all heard these arguments, and we are going to keep hearing themas long as we insist upon calling ourselves “atheists.

Why should we fall into this trap? Why should we stand obediently in the space provided, in the space carved out by the conceptual scheme of theistic religion? It’s as though, before the debate even begins, our opponents draw the chalk-outline of a dead man on the sidewalk, and we just walk up and lie down in it.

Instead of doing this, consider what would happen if we simply used words like “reason” and “evidence.” What is the argument against reason? It’s true that a few people will bite the bullet here and argue that reason is itself a problem, that the Enlightenment was a failed project, etc. But the truth is that there are very few people, even among religious fundamentalists, who will happily admit to being enemies of reason. In fact, fundamentalists tend to think they are champions of reason and that they have very good reasons for believing in God. Nobody wants to believe things on bad evidence. The desire to know what is actually going on in world is very difficult to argue with. In so far as we represent that desire, we become difficult to argue with. And this desire is not reducible to an interest group. It’s not a club or an affiliation, and I think trying to make it one diminishes its power.

[...]

Steve Jobs releases the iPhone, and I’m sure it wasn’t twenty minutes before someone asked, “when are you going to make this thing smaller?” Notice that very few people at this juncture, no matter what they’ve accomplished, say, “I’m done. I’ve met all my goals. Now I’m just going to stay here & eat ice cream until I die in front of you.”

Even when everything has gone as well as it can go, the search for happiness continues, the effort required to keep doubt and dissatisfaction and boredom at bay continues, moment to moment. If nothing else, the reality of death and the experience of losing loved ones punctures even the most gratifying and well-ordered life.

In this context, certain people have traditionally wondered whether a deeper form of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness that is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our pleasures and successes and avoiding our pains? Is there a form of happiness that is not dependent upon having one’s favorite food always available to be placed on one’s tongue or having all one’s friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or having good books to read, or having something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be utterly happy before anything happens, before one’s desires get gratified, in spite of life’s inevitable difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

This question, I think, lies at the periphery of everyone’s consciousness. We are all, in some sense, living our answer to it—and many of us are living as though the answer is “no.” No, there is nothing more profound that repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding one’s pains; there is nothing more profound that seeking satisfaction, both sensory and intellectual. Many of us seem think that all we can do is just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.

But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of people like the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called “meditation” or “contemplation”—as a means of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.

Contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves “atheists” or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of “spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo,what contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.

Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other people—he’s probably mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day long silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This is perfectly compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.

Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking.There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us.It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.

From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can’t borrow someone else’s contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.

My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in certain possibilities in principle. I don’t know if our universe is, as JBS Haldane said, “not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose.” But I am sure that it is stranger than we, as “atheists,” tend to represent while advocating atheism. As “atheists” we give others, and even ourselves, the sense that we are well on our way toward purging the universe of mystery. As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for human solidarity. It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.

We are faced, however, with the challenge of communicating this view to others. We are faced with the monumental task of persuading a myth-infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that we need not console or frighten ourselves or our children with Iron Age fairy tales. I don’t think there is a more important intellectual struggle to win; it has to be fought from a hundred sides, all at once,and continuously; but it seems to me that there is no reason for us to fight in well-ordered ranks, like the red coats of Atheism.

Finally, I think it’s useful to envision what victory will look like. Again, the analogy with racism seems instructive to me. What will victory against racism look like, should that happy day ever dawn? It certainly won’t be a world in which a majority of people profess that they are “nonracist.” Most likely, it will be a world in which the very concept of separate races has lost its meaning.

We will have won this war of ideas against religion when atheism is scarcely intelligible as a concept. We will simply find ourselves in a world in which people cease to praise one another for pretending to know things they do not know. This is certainly a future worth fighting for. It may be the only future compatible with our long-term survival as a species.

Mathematics is regarded as a demonstrative science. Finished mathematics presented in a finished form appears as purely demonstrative [calculative], consisting of proofs only. Yet mathematics in the making resembles any other human knowledge in the making. You have to guess a mathematical theorem before you prove it; you have to guess the idea of the proof before you carry through the details. You have to combine observations and follow analogies; you have to try and try again. If the learning of mathematics reflects to any degree the invention of mathematics, it must have a place for guessing, for plausible inference. In strict reasoning the principal thing is to distinguish a proof from a guess, a valid demonstration from an invalid attempt. In plausible reasoning the principal thing is to distinguish a guess from a guess, a more reasonable guess from a less reasonable guess. Certainly, let us learn proving, but let us also learn guessing. To be a good mathematician, or a good gambler, or good at anything, you must be a good guesser.

For all its glory, "logic" is virtually useless in any real-world reasoning and argumentation task. Nobody actually expresses their ideas logically, except in some rare circumstances where the discussion is about some microworld domain for which logical reasoning is possible in principle. And logic is used even less in coming up with the ideas and positions.

In this light, the weight that the first logic and argumentation textbooks give to propositional logic is absolutely hilarious. I doubt that there has ever been a single situation anywhere where someone has successfully come to a solution and argued his case to others using propositional logic, for some nontrivial real-world issue.

I was once amused to notice that the popular lists of logical fallacies are practically isomorphic with the lists of techniques of informal logic and argumentation.

Consider "Ad hominem",the most beloved of all logical fallacies. I am sorry, but I still don't consider the representatives of the multibillion dollar tobacco institute to be very credible when they claim that smoking is not harmful to health. Or "Appeal to authority". I again apologize, but for some reason I just tend to trust Richard Dawkins over a sideshow creationist preacher.

I bet it would be interesting to see someone present an argument for some nontrivial issue that is relevant to everyday life,in a way that the individual steps of the argument are made explicit and the argument does not contain any part that is structurally isomorphic with some well-known logical fallacy. I wonder if anyone could point me to an actual example. Until I see such an example, I think I stay in my opinion... or am I now committing the dreaded "Argument from ignorance"?  *

The Fallacy Fallacy

People love to collect lists of "fallacious" argument forms, with which to club opponents. Specialists have found little support for the idea that one can tell an argument is bad just by looking at its form. *

Systematic, rule-based [calculation] is a tiny sliver of your full powers of cognition, and it requires non-rule-based judgment to tell when and where it applies. For example, how can you tell that your cat is hungry? By the way he's purring and walking back and forth across the keyboard even as you keep trying to push him out of the way? That's probably part of how you can tell, but really there are a trillion factors going into that judgment, most of which you can't possibly be conscious of. And even if you identified the full rule that you're applying (assuming such a thing even exists), what rule could tell you that that rule is valid in this case?

If you held back on making judgments like "my cat is hungry" until you had a complete set of rules, which themselves had been validated by other rules, all the way to perfect bedrock rules that are rationally unchallengeable, your cat would starve before you did something. Yet, your brain has astounding powers to make guesses of all sorts, based on negligible amounts of information. You're typing a wiki page, you sense this annoyance at the corner of your consciousness, and suddenly the amazing machinery of your brain puts a guess into your mind: "Hey, I'll bet Rufus is hungry." So then you place your bet and pour some food for him. The bet is not a sure thing, but nothing is.

Fully systematic rules are ways to get things that you can define in advance, in environments where every possible observation is known, along with the appropriate response, so all that's left is to make the observation and then perform the response. Such perfectly understood regions of reality are only a tiny part of what's there, though. Most of the goodies live in the Yawning Void.

You know you're a Scrooge when your own publicist apparently photoshopped you into Christmas morning. Dennett looks like something the cat dragged in from a lake full of dead people. Dawkins looks like he's pimping for Harvard Econ. But Harris looks completely normal for first season 90210.

It's awesome how they're each dramatically quirkyalone in the photos...but maybe next year for variety someone will insert the cast of Pleasantville!

According to a Harvard study, the top seven counties for life expectancy are in Colorado. Is there something magic in the air there? TIME's correspondent from top-ranking Clear Creek County investigates:

It hardly seems coincidental that all seven — Clear Creek, Eagle, Gilpin, Grand, Jackson, Park and Summit — lie either on or near the Continental Divide and are spectacularly beautiful.

A minority of games have "vying" aspects, chances to adjust the stake with impact on the play of the game. Poker is unique as a pure vying game. The outcome is entirely luck. Skill cannot be exercised on the cards, only on the setting of the stake. [...]

[Vying] is the only theoretically interesting popular game. There is interesting work to be done on games like chess and go, but the basic theory is already known. Existing algorithms could play perfectly. But we still have no accepted theory for poker, or bidding in bridge, or Monopoly. [...]

I think the proper way to analyze poker is through derivative accounting. [...]

The only edge you get in poker [from someone who knows your full basic strategy] comes from bluffing. [...]

Poker may be the only activity popularly considered to evidence both masculinity and intelligence.