Hey Rutherford, Goldacre, Humanists and Skeptics

[binaryfinery]

I know you like to think that you are Galileo - that you are one of the heroes who would stand up to anti-rationalism and anti-science and would bravely take a stand, and put your selves on the line to hold to your principles of reason and science and objectivity.

But you are not that person are you? You are actually the people who, in a society of religious orthodoxy, would be siding with the orthodoxy to condemn the minority speaking for rationality. At best, you would stay silent as others persecuted those calling for science and rationality, but, more likely given your actions over the past decade, and yes I am looking hard at you humanists now, you would be joining in the jeering and persecution.

Because you see, those who speak out, its a personality type. Its those who have the clarity of thought and morality to be able to think for themselves. To be able to discern for themselves, and then have the courage and integrity to hold firm to what they have evidenced and to speak out. Its about valuing integrity over tribalism. Its about valuing integrity over being popular.

And you self-identified empiricists and rationalists have failed that test, so badly failed. Your moment came, your moment came in gender ideology, your moment came especially in Tavistock. And you failed. The people who actually are walking in the footsteps of Galileo are people like Graham Lineham, Maya Forstater, Hannah Barnes, Alf up a tree, Jo Phoenix, Helen Joyce, KJK, Julie Bindel, and all the many, many other women, and some men, - most whose names will never be in newspapers, who have been patiently gathering the evidence, gathering the data, analysing the facts, speaking out.

We are the rationalists, the empiricists, the ones who follow the evidence, the data and draw our conclusions from that, not you. We are the ones who speak out, who put our necks on the line and pay the price for what is true and can be evidenced. Not you.

All you are, are people who have enjoyed mocking and laughing at the religious, the followers of supernatural beliefs, the homeopaths, because, in the time you are fortunate to live, that was easy and no cost to you. But when you were actually called to stand up for the principles you claimed to have, by God you failed to do so. How you failed.

How you can have the brass neck to publicly stand up for science and reason and rationality after that, how you can lack that self-reflection I will never know. And Rutherford,. saying we are mistaking caution for incuriosity is such bullshit. This debate has been raging for over a decade. It doesn't take that long to see though gender ideology. You are simply trying to hide your cowardice under a cloak of incuriosity.

( And yes, not all humanists and skeptics but an awful lot of them, especially that none of that should have fallen for this unevidenced, counter reality belief system. Not that liberal humanist on a recent episode of Anti-social, she was good, I liked her)

Hear hear

I wonder if any of them will ever have the humility to admit that they have fallen for an ideology, just like the ones they make a living from deconstructing?

How gracious and courageous and full of integrity would it be for one of them to hold their hands up admit to being a fallable human, like the rest of us?

Yup. And it’s core to the principle of the scientific approach that they claim to value, that when the evidence shows you got it wrong, you accept that.

I think you may be falling somewhat into the same trap that caused these people to err.

I think you are quite right to think that it's a particular sort of personality that will tend to go along with the crowd or not. The crowd might be the majority of society, but it also might be some sort of group within that.

In this case, it's the latter - an "in group" they believe is defined by being the only really rational people.

The problem is this - they are not the only real rational people. Empiricism is not the only logical or consistent way to think about the world. Nor is humanism. From the perspective of philosophy, that belief is naive and narrow, and mainly shows lack of knowledge of the breadth of coherent thought systems.

This group of pop skeptics were already starting from a position of delusion by imagining that their positivism is self-evident, it should not be a surprise that they are prone to other delusions and fallacies as well.

I think this is in large parts an organisational problem. Once a few members of an organisation have fallen for this ideology, it has been (and still is) clearly very difficult for others in that organisation to openly disagree. I am a humanist/atheist, call me what you like, and I did not fall for this ideology. Humanists UK has been a huge disappointment to me, but so has the left-wing press, the Green Party, Labour and the LibDems, the organisation I work for and many others. I do agree with you that for a group who claims to be rational and pro-science, Humanists UK's stance is incredibly irrational and anti-science.

Ummm, where did I say it was the only way to think about the world? I said its how they say they think about the world and they have failed to do so. We have done a better job of that, not them.

pathetic cowards. They’d have been holding the tongs for the inquisition

Well yes.

A self-proclaimed 'rationalist pro-science' organisation that does not allow dissent or debate is also shameful and totally hypocritical.

The Humanists I know have fallen for GI.

Have to say that I have not been surprised that the Humanists and Skeptics fell for this. I used to be involved in these circles but left as I found them not to be full of critical thinkers but rather a club for people who thought the same and wanted to laugh at anyone with supernatural beliefs. It was a tribal club, not a home for people who really liked to be challenged and approach things with rigour.

Still shocking that they cannot their hypocrisy though.

I think they would have been.

Yeah it's tragicomic to see people who are all about rationality and debunking pseudoscience and supernatural beliefs say that everyone has a gender soul.

At least Richard Dawkins can be relied on to say whatever the hell he thinks. He's not perfect, nobody is, but he's true to himself. Based, as the youth would say.

I suppose their punishment is their own cognitive dissonance - it's very bad for the psyche to gaslight yourself.

I found them not to be full of critical thinkers but rather a club for people who thought the same and wanted to laugh at anyone with supernatural beliefs. It was a tribal club, not a home for people who really liked to be challenged and approach things with rigour.

This is very true. A lot of these people would have been as religious as anybody else if they'd lived in a less secular age.

There are plenty of non-empirical skeptics... but then there are plenty of unchristian Christians. Humans are just like that, sadly. I think the "gender soul" is an insightful way of putting it. Left-wing (usually atheist) progressives of a certain personality type do seem to behave with an almost religious devotion at times. There was that weird (creepy) adoration of Corbyn and the attendant cult-lite Momentum movement.

Of course, what this thread is missing is a show of gratitude to Hilary Cass, a professional empiricists, who has just exploded the pseudoscience used by many TRAs to justify their ideology. The Cass Report is a definite win for empiricism as a means of sorting reality from fantasy.

Is this the guy that said he knew nothing about it, and then 10 minutes later said he was writing a book about it?

I cannot wait for another book written by a bloke that admits he knows nothing about the subject of the book.

Belief in "progress" is a worldview, held as dear in the hearts of its adherents as any religion:
e.g.

Science is part of progress, so must be good.
Medicine is progress, so good.
Technology is progress, so good.
Religion is part of history, so must be bad.
Sex-based societal roles are old-fashioned, so bad.
Social progress is progress, so good.
Social justice must therefore be good.
Upholding rights of oppressed minorities is progress, so good.
Trans rights must be upheld, part of progress, so good.

Whoops, Trans rights are in conflict with science? Cannot compute. Brain in meltdown. Cannot compute.
Must shout louder. Nasty TERFS are confusing me. They are anti-progress. They are evil. Progress is everything.

I found them not to be full of critical thinkers but rather a club for people who thought the same and wanted to laugh at anyone with supernatural beliefs. It was a tribal club, not a home for people who really liked to be challenged and approach things with rigour

Same here. My experience was of a group that was very male dominated and self satisfied. Not questioning things in any actually scientific way but simply asserting the superiority of having hard evidence on their ‘side’ while in practice simply all sharing the same politics.
Therefore as this issue has revealed, being in reality a very socially conservative closed minded group. And just as likely to happily proselytise for unevidenced beliefs as any other quacky woo woo group that they thought was way beneath their much finer minds.

This is why I left the humanists.

They weren't ever a 100% perfect match for me, or my philosophical views, but when I joined, I felt that on the whole it was better to be part of and work with an existing organisation that was close enough, rather than to embark on a likely fruitless search for some tiny and probably powerless group that would represent my exact position in every way.

I got to meet and share ideas with people with a similar enough set of values and a more or less shared perception of reality, saw a lot of interesting guest speakers (some humanist and some not), joined in discussions and debates, got involved with some local campaigning, and was trained to go and speak in schools about what humanists are and what they believe.

Once the BHA/H-UK started reciting the gender catechism, though, I realised that, at least at a national level, they didn't really share my values at all. I'm not non-religious because I have something against religion in particular, I'm non-religious mostly because of particular qualities that religious claims tend to have, qualities which the gender claims share. (Or, at least, I feel like it's that way round; in reality, humans tend to take on beliefs and decide why they believe them afterwards ) Genderism requires you to accept unfalsifiable claims on faith, and to find complex linguistic detours around things we know to be verifiably true. Believing in genderism isn't like having a position on women's rights, gay rights, trans rights etc. IMO — my opinions and politics are leftist, progressive and liberal, but I don't get to have my own facts.

I was disappointed to discover that they failed to apply the same principles to a fashionable idea that they claimed to use as their basis for evaluating religious ideas. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised — humans don't actually work like that. Maybe I hoped that on an organisational level, new truth claims actually could be dispassionately evaluated according to stated principles.

Anyway, yeah, I left and told them why in an email.

Otherwise known as the Whig interpretation of history - discredited in 1931.

Of course, what this thread is missing is a show of gratitude to Hilary Cass, a professional empiricists, who has just exploded the pseudoscience used by many TRAs to justify their ideology. The Cass Report is a definite win for empiricism as a means of sorting reality from fantasy

You are quite right. Big up to Hilary Cass and to all those who laid themselves on the line by undertaking the groundwork of challenge to ‘Transing’ kids which brought enough attention to this issue that the report was commissioned.

Big up to all those who’ve been prepared to be unpopular to whistle blow all this harm being caused to troubled children, and to girls and women

Very well said, and pretty much exactly what I think!

They absolutely would have been. They so clearly display the same character and patterns of thinking and behaviour you see the more fundamentalist religious.

@Yetmorebeanstocount

I think this belief in progress is part of why Humanists fell so hard for gender ideology. My partner and I got their magazine for a while and it had their core position/ beliefs in it which included a belief in humanity’s inevitable march through never ending progress to a shiny future. Quite eschatological!

I concluded from reading their stuff that humanism is actually an offshoot from Christianity. Their core beliefs seem to have been absorbed from Christianity.

So, so disappointed in Rutherford.

Agree OP. It’s not just that humanists, skeptics and media “fun science” types tend to see themselves as progressive, but also that they’re often led by lefty males, some of them comedians, who are a core demographic for wokebro misogyny. Those “witty” science programmes are mainly led by these types.

I do wonder what goes on in the mind, and household, of Brian Cox who is married to Gia Milinovich but works closely with Robin Ince. I don’t see him making any public statements on it but I might have missed something.

I do personally understand not being able to speak out publicly - I have had to be careful as I’m freelance in a notoriously captured field. I’m a single mum and need to earn a living. I’ve survived the last decade by keeping my head down. But I haven’t gone along with it either. And if you’re in the public eye and supposedly a rational voice on science there’s no excuse for endorsing gender ideology. It should be absolute low-hanging fruit for anyone who wants to unpick pseudoscience.

I also wonder what Rutherford’s colleague Hannah Fry thinks, who has done a lot of work on sex disparity in maths and has survived a female-only cancer. I struggle to imagine she’s on board, or at least hope she’s not.

I think humanists, like everyone else, are hindered by the use of "believe in" to mean different things, including:
— to hold something as valuable, desirable or important, and think that it's possible (e.g. "I believe in working hard and doing your best"),
— to accept that something is true or really exists, and, often, to accept it without, or even despite, any evidence (e.g. "I believe in ghosts"), and
— to have confidence in something or someone (e.g. "I believe in our new president").

So I "believe in" human progress, in that I think it's valuable, desirable and important for human society as a whole to develop in ways that change things for the better, and think (well, hope) that it's possible.

But I don't "believe in" the existence of human progress as an ineluctable force whose presence we see written on history and can reasonably project into the future.

And the amount of confidence I have in human progress… er, yeah, that varies

One of the areas where I've always differed from H-UK is that they're a bit more optimistic than I am about humanity's ability to do this 😅 But I think behind all the guff, the organisation's "belief in" human progress is probably more of the aspirational type, like mine, than it is of the "human progress as a truth in whose existence we believe" type. They do tend to write about this stuff in a way that gets up my nose a bit, tho.

And I agree that secular humanism of the type the BHA/H-UK subscribes to is very much influenced by the culturally Christian background of many of its current members, as well as probably the vast majority of its originators, at least in the UK. I mean, to be fair, how could it not be? But they/we could do better at critically examining these influences.

And thanks for citing Galileo OP - one of my heroes. I’d bloody love to hear what he had to say about this capture of authority by something so unevidenced. He would be fabulously and poetically scathing. He’s probably spinning in his grave fast enough to power a small city.