Are atheists "kids"?

One accusation I see against atheists come up a fair bit on reddit's r/atheism is that we're 'angry 13 year olds', that we're 'in a rebellious phase', that 'atheism is a passing fad'.

To this 48 year old homeowner with a family and a steady job, the 'rebellious' bit seems hilarious.

So let's compare the age distributions, shall we?

In 2010, Reddit did a survey.

Some months later, redditor NukeThePope did a survey of r/atheism.

Both surveys asked about age and categorized it into broad age groups. Now these samples are self-selected, with the usual biases that implies - but both sets of biases would presumably be of similar size and direction on age, so they might still be reasonably comparable.

However, because the age groups don't correspond, I'm going to smooth both distributions - doing kernel density estimates of log(age) with the bandwidth set just above where binning artifacts start to appear - which is slightly different for the two, because they have different sets of binwidths - and then transforming back to the original scale (and don't forget the Jacobian, he whispers to himself!).

Here's how that comes out:


Now, on the left half of the distributions, they're almost coincident. In the mid-to-late 20's there are relatively very slightly more in r/atheism, and in the mid-30's, very slightly fewer. Then the distributions are almost coincident again.

That is, around the upper quartile - well into adulthood - the atheists look to be perhaps a couple of years younger (I did some additional analysis to estimate the difference in that area) on average. Otherwise, there's really no clear difference.

So atheists - at least the denizens of r/atheism - aren't particularly different from everyone else; they seem to pretty much just reflect the demographics of reddit.

r/atheism passes 200,000 subscribers

It's gone absolutely nuts lately, adding about 25000 new subscribers in just over a week. It was averaging 390 new subscribers a day, and then it got made one of the groups on the new default reddit front page on the 18th. It's been averaging about 3500 new subscribers a day since.

Oh, and I passed 4 years of blogging this month, though at about a post a month this year, you can't really call that blogging.

Lower rates of religiosity associated with more trust of others

I tried posting about this ages ago, but Blogger clagged when I hit publish and everything I tried didn't fix the problem. Then I had some computer issues; eventually leading to a new machine. Finally Blogger seemed to wake up, so I decided I better try to reconstruct the post. So anyway, in honour of my third reddit birthday:

I saw some OECD figures on trust ("Percentage of people expressing a high level of trust in others") at the national level for 32 countries, and tracked them down to this page.
(The data come from two sources - the European Social Survey and the International Social Survey Programme.)


Specifically, at the bottom is a spreadsheet (CO1.XLS) that has some displays of the data, including plots looking at the relationship between Trust and two economic factors (median income, and income inequality). These are 2008 figures. I decided to throw Irreligion (specifically, the 2007-2008 Gallup figures there, which relate to the question "Is religion important in your daily life", and the Irreligion figures are the percentage responding negatively) into the mix and see how that related.

As it turns out, quite strongly:






(Click for larger)









But of course, maybe that relationship is actually explained by those other variables the OECD identified, income and income inequality. Income is median household income (US$PPP). Income inequality is measured by Gini coefficient (low is more equal, high is more unequal). Let's look at those as well (Ignore the plot at the bottom right for now). The black numbers are linear correlation coefficients.






(Click for larger)
















All three veriables are strongly related to Trust. The plot against Gini Coefficient has a down slope (negative correlation) indicating trust goes down when incomes are less equal - not surprising.

So I decided to fit a model to see what the important drivers were. Are any of the variables still relevant after the other two have been included?

Though I would normally not assume a straight line, here the relationships are all so near to straight it's not worth trying to do something fancy, so I just fit a linear regression of Trust on the other three variables.



lm(Trust ~ Income + GiniCoeff + Irreligion, data = oecdtr)

Coefficients:
             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept)  3.704e+01  2.107e+01  1.758   0.09270
Income       1.034e-03  2.854e-04  3.625   0.00150
GiniCoeff   -6.232e+01  4.535e+01 -1.374   0.18320
Irreligion   4.065e-01  1.330e-01  3.056   0.00579

Residual standard error: 8.221 on 22 degrees of freedom
(8 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared: 0.8119, Adjusted R-squared: 0.7862
F-statistic: 31.65 on 3 and 22 DF, p-value: 3.671e-08


(Analysis, including plots performed in R.)

The main things to note is that all of the variables maintain the same sign of relationship when the other variables are included compared to looking at the relationship alone (this is not always the case - adjusting for other important variables can sometimes flip things around). After including the other variables, Trust still increases with Income and Irreligion, and still decreases with increasing Income Inequality.

The fourth plot above is of Trust against the fit from this model - it accounts for a lot of the variation in trust in other people across the countries involved.

However, as we see from the regression output, the Income Inequality (Gini Coeff) variable is no longer statistically significant - most of its relationship to Trust can be accounted for by the other variables. But Income and Irreligion are both still highly significant predictors of Trust.

That doesn't mean that having low levels of religious belief necessarily causes to more trust (it's probably that they both relate to other social factors, like social services, public health, support for the unemployed, crime rates and so on).

I nevertheless found the relationship much stronger than I would have anticipated.
I think that's very interesting.

Science Readiness and Religion

Susan White (Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics) and Paul Cottle (Florida State University) produced an index of Science and Engineering Readiness (SERI) for US states, based on a variety of information including Advanced Placement scores, National Assessment of Educational Progress reports, teacher certification requirements by state and physics class enrollment data.

I decided to compare those figures with the percentage of people who said yes to the question "Is religion important in your daily life?" (a measure of religiosity) in each US state.






(Click for larger image)


There's a surprisingly clear negative correlation.


Science and Engineering Readiness Index figures come from here, and religious importance figures from here.

(The importance of religion figures can be copypasta'd here)








That's one very scary potential explanation of why the US is falling behind in science. People watching the Texas SBOE (and on it!) may do well to take note.

Rapture bingo card, post-rapture

A few days ago, before the May 21 'Rapture', a Rapture excuse bingo card was posted to reddit.
Since the rapture, how has it gone? As tomcool notes, not bad:









































h/t tomthecool, erekose and STUN_Runner

How NOT to regress murder rates on religious belief

This post on reddit's r/atheism did a linear regression of murder rates on "importance of religion" figures (both sets of data from wikipedia).

The poster there also looked at IHDI (inequality-adjusted human development index) and its effect on the relationship.

The poster found a weak (and statistically insignificant) relationship between importance of religion and murder, but after adjusting for IHDI the sign changed (though the relationship remained weak).

But much about the analysis - and hence the conclusions is wrong or suspect.

(I'd normally have replied on reddit, but since this discussion is relatively long for a comment and involves figures, it's better written up elsewhere. Further, since this sort of analysis is the very raison d'être of my benighted blog, it goes here.)

While I usually work in R these days, I'm going to do the calculations for this in a spreadsheet, like the original - so that those looking at the original poster's spreadsheet can follow along.

First, I noticed that the murder rates are highly skew. Since the relationships are fairly weak, this skewness applies to both the conditional and unconditional distribution of murder-rate. This instantly invalidates all the significance-testing, so any conclusions about the significance or otherwise of the relationships goes out the window.

Second, the relationship with importance of religious belief is not monontonic, let alone linear. Any conclusions about the direction of the relationship is meaningless without taking this into account. (In what follows I am going to look at "religion is unimportant" percentages rather than "religion is important" - they mostly add to 100%, or nearly so. I do this for a particular reason, though the other figures should give similar conclusions.)

Third, some of the "religion is unimportant" figures are for countries where religious belief is compulsory or effectively so. Let's take Indonesia as an example. In Indonesia, you must choose one of a small number of religions. Lack of religious belief is not allowed. So some countries are "jammed up" against the origin, and the extremely high religious belief figures are highly suspect. Seriously, everyone in some countries thinks religion is important? Absolutely everyone? (This is one reason why for most of my analyses these days I use Wikipedia's "irreligion" figures instead, as in my previous post.)

The "jamming up against zero" issue tends to make relationships curve there, so I transformed that variable too. The usual transform with percentages is the logit transform but those few suspect "0%" figures make that impossible. I could regularize the logit transform, which usually works quite well, but in this case I just took square roots (in a previous analysis with this type of irreligion figures used here I tried a cube-root transformation, since for low percentages it spreads the figures better (it's more like a logit). With this analysis, either succeeds fairly well, but I figured the square root would be better understood.

Since pictures speak much more clearly, let's look at a picture.
I have split the unimportance of religion data into four ranges - first, high figures (in blue - there's a large gap that makes a convenient breakpoint), then medium (teal) and low (green) figues, and finally the 0% figures (red-brown) which I regard as suspect:

Click for larger image.

(I got the data from Wikipedia again myself and cleaned it a little, as there were some errors in the data that had to be fixed but which shouldn't have affected the original poster's figures.)

We see that the 0% figures are inconsistent with the trend in the low figures, and the low figures show a distinctly different pattern to the higher two groups. The upper two groups are reasonably consistent, however - we could probably use a single straight line to describe both. But on the untransformed scale for religious unimportance, there is s stronger suggestion of changing slope)

The log of murder rate is also not monotonic in IHDI though the change is less spectacular (the relationship between IHDI and "religion is unimportant" percentage is strong and close to linear over a fair portion of the range - but again, not clearly monotonic over the whole range).

All of these issues make the conclusions of the original analysis nonsense.

What can we see? the least religious countries do indeed have a lower murder rate. The question remains as to whether this effect remains after considering IHDI - but here's the final concern, though it's not a statistical issue:

Since IHDI is strongly associated with religious belief, if IHDI is substantively caused by religious belief, IHDI could be mediating the relationship between the other two variables. If religion is causative, it might be "acting through" IHDI to reduce murder rates. So we have to be cautious about concluding it isn't causative if it beccomes insignificant after adjusting for IHDI without some rather in depth analysis (and even then with heavy caveats).

I plan to do a more in depth analysis of these figures in R at some point, which will take account of the nonlinearity properly, via additive models.

Are the religious more generous?

It is common to see figures or claims that suggest that religious believers are more generous in terms of donations to charity than the non-religious. (One thing that often concerned me about such figures is that they generally include donations made to their church, which even when limited to money used for actually charitable purposes often have an ulterior motive - proselytization.)

Today I saw a post in reddit's r/atheism that pointed to this information on Red Cross donations by country:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_red_cro_don-health-red-cross-donations

Curious about potential drivers of the figures, I decided to try to adjust for GDP, so I got the GDP (PPP) figures from here:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_ppp-economy-gdp-ppp

So I then divided the Red Cross donations by millions of dollars of GDP to give dollars donated per million dollars GDP, a kind of "generosity" measure in a rough sense (a better measure would reflect donations per "spare" dollar after basic needs). I discovered a down-trend of log-generosity against log-GDP (richer countries donate a somewhat smaller proportion on average). Wondering about other drivers, I then took the irreligion figures from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_by_country

(specifically, the 2007-8 Gallup figures, which uses the very broad definition implied by the question "Is religion important?" - and I used those figures because they covered the most countries) and plotted log-generosity against the irreligion percentage figures, which give this plot:



[The blue curve is a lowess smooth of the relationship, with f = 0.9]

And what do we find? In spite of the fact that this measure of generosity decreases with GDP, this measure of generosity increases with the percentage of people who see religion is unimportant. Is this the whole story? No - there's all sorts of other things that could be adjusted for.

But it certainly doesn't support the usual story - and if anything, suggests the opposite. There's at least some suggestion here that maybe it goes the other way.

Daylight observations of Venus with the naked eye

Near the end of January, I happened to be up just a while before dawn and saw Venus in a clear eastern sky, a little below a crescent moon.

I had read that it was possible to see Venus in daylight, and a friend had photographed it in the western sky near sunset, so I figured that with the moon as a guide I should be able to work out where to look for it.

I went back to bed and then tried again around 9 am (AEST), at which time it was close to directly overhead, and with the aid of binoculars and the moon as a cue I located Venus with a few minutes looking. Given the location, I could make it out very easily with the naked eye. I checked again every hour and found it almost immediately. It was still perfectly visible at 1pm, with the sun blazing overhead and Venus well into the western sky.

Myth confirmed!

I think Rule 34 may be wrong

I couldn't find any porn on the subject of Rule 34.

reddit's r/atheism passes 100,000 subscribers

[Clocked over at around 8:20 am (GMT)]

100,000 atheists (well, mostly atheists) in one forum makes for quite a lot of links, posting and discussion

Human Development Index ... and unbelief

Taking the newly released UN Human Development Index (HDI) figures from here, and percentage of unbelief figures from here (specifically, the Gallup figures), I decided to take a look at how they were related:

The green curve is a loess curve, which simply smooths the relationship to indicate the basic trend.

The fact that HDI increases with Unbelief percentage does not mean that greater unbelief necessarily causes greater HDI; the causality may run the other way, or both variables may be caused by some other variable, or there may be complicated feedback between the two variables, and probably several other causal factors (which is what I would imagine is the truth).

The identified countries, clockwise from top left, are United Arab Emirates, USA, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Dem.Rep.Congo.

We have a budding mathematician

(budding ... becaue that's how mathematicians reproduce, of course.)

My daughter, who is in year three, was given the opportunity to enter the Australian Mathematics Competition (which presently has kids from over 40 countries competing in it).

Not everyone gets to enter; at her school it was only offered to the kids in the extension class.

She got a distinction, which places her in the top 15% of her division (the year 3 and 4 students that entered). Pretty good going, I thought.

Edit: Turns out she was in the top 6% among the entrants in the competition, for her year and the year above.

---

I believe I actually competed in an early incarnation of the same competition way back when I was a school kid, in around year 10 - probably the first year it was offered in NSW, when it was called the Wales awards. (Assuming it's the same competition; in any case I got $40 in an account from the Wales bank, now Westpac. For me at the time that was a lot of money and I used it carefully - I didn't actually finish spending it until I went to university, nearly two and a half years later. I don't know if they still offer any cash.)

Atheist blogroll widget

I only just saw that Blogrolling.com is shutting down and that Mojoey's atheist blogroll has been affected; he has some new (temporary) code up that will link to the list of blogs while he gets something new up.

If I get time today I'd put his new code in, but in any case I am putting this here to remind me that I need to do something about it, and to help promulgate the issue (if I didn't know, presumably some other people don't either).

La trahison des mages

This is what a smackdown looks like

Over at Dear Coke Talk blog, coketalk has on occasion delivered some epic smackdowns.

Take a look at this one, where every sentence someone wrote to her has been linked to the wikipedia page of a logical fallacy it invokes.

Ouch.

Is faith a reliable way to find religious truths?

A response to "I just have faith."

By faith here we mean religious faith of course - which is related to the meaning of faith as something like "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence" (one of the meanings of faith) rather than the kind of faith that is confidence that arises because of reason or material evidence (a different meaning of faith). Beware equivocational imitations.


Is faith a reliable way to find religious truths?


While we ponder that question, look at this:


If the answer is yes, how, then, it is the case that more theists in the world think Christianity is false than think it is true — surely faith, if it is a reliable path to truth, would overwhelmingly lead people of faith to truth?

Either faith isn't a reliable way to find truth - and so we should not rely on religious faith to discover what's true
or
the truth that most people are led to by faith is that Christianity is false.

(Aside: I'm not making an argumentum as populum here - I'm showing a consequence of the premise of reliability)


The same argument works for any religion.

Any consequences for the old argument about "different ways of knowing" is left as an exercise for the reader.

Financial advice

A guy with a gun, a really good plan and a bit of luck might steal a hundred thousand dollars.

To steal a billion dollars, he has to swap the gun for a briefcase.

And the Christian Lobby goes ballistic about ethics classes... again

This morning on breakfast-news TV* there was discussion of the ethics class issue, between a representative from the NSW Council of Churches and another fellow whose affiliation I didn't catch but I presume to be representing the St. James Centre - the group that designed the syllabus for the ethics class trial.

*(this was on ABC2 - the ABC is basically a government-owned but editorially independent national broadcaster - their breakfast news and current affairs coverage is substantially more serious than on the commercial networks, which tend to be more like the US network-style breakfast programs - a glossy entertainment magazine of celebrities, diets and other ephemera)

Well, the guy from the Council of Churches was pretty upset that the government was going to go ahead and implement the recommendations, but his central objection was telling. He stated that the biggest problem was that the students *currently* getting religious instruction ("scripture class") *would have the option to take the ethics class*.

That's right - he was objecting primarily to parents having the choice, if their child was currently going to religious classes. But he didn't actually explain why the choice was bad.

Why is this? Well, the problem was he couldn't raise a serious objection to the kids not currently in religious classes having the choice of attending the ethics class instead of doing nothing (though he did attack the content of the syllabus also) - the interviewer asked him specifically what objection he could raise to then having the choice. So he was only left with the fact that the kids not already sitting out the various forms of available religious instruction would be able to choose to opt for ethics classes as well. [The church lobbhy have even argued at one point that the kids in religious classes would miss out on instruction in ethics (!) ... oops. Er, no, we didn't mean to say we don't teach that.]

This choice is a problem for the churches. While about 20% of Australians list no religion on the census, many of the ones in NSW still have their children attend school religious classes for a variety of reasons. There is also an even larger group that do have a nominal religion and list it on the census (i.e. they list whatever religion ran the religious class they attended themselves when they were children, which would have been the church one of their parents actually attended at some point) - these "nominally religious" people do send their kids to religious instruction - but many of them would choose not to if there was a serious alternative.

Provided sufficient volunteers can be found to run the ethics classes, this could easily halve the attendance at religious instruction (it's what they feared before the trial began, and it's what actually happened).

Hardly anyone actually goes to church any more (to my recollection, something like 10% of Australians attend church more than twice a year, other than weddings and funerals - and most weddings and funerals aren't even held in churches any more). Apart from that core, the rest of the kids are "up for grabs", and they know parents will vote with their feet.

Sundary school is largely a wasteland. The religious classes are, for many, the only place the churches have to get their hooks in... so they're hanging on for dear life to the one really solid free shot at impressionable minds they've got - an advantage they've had entrenched in legislation for 150 years now. The legislation won't change, but for the first time there will be an alternative to religious instruction for those who opt out of religious class, and many, many more are going to take that option.

They're afraid (and they made that quite clear) that free choice will mean an even more rapid demise than they're experiencing now. And they're doing whatever it takes to make sure that doesn't happen.




Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle

Finally - a real alternative to religious classes

The report on the trial of ethics classes in ten NSW schools has come in with a recommendation to adopt the ethics classes alternative model used in the trial.

News story is here.

(Edit: broken link above now repaired)

Since the Premier had already said if the report recommended adoption, that it would be implemented, it looks like it will go ahead next year. On top of the same-sex-couple adoption legislation (her speech), this will make another worthy achievement for her (nevertheless still doomed) government. Keneally will go down at the next election, but if she manages this, I will certainly remember her as having had a number of very worthwhile achievement.

It's worth noting that Keneally is a Catholic, and has an MA in religious studies from a US Catholic university (she was born in and grew up in the US).

Thankfully, someone is keeping a watch on those very scary atheists...

Someone is very worried.

It's all red because atheists are dangerous and must be watched. Or something will happen!