Painting Fakes

Many of you will already have heard of the "Dunning and Kruger Effect", a piece of psychological research which has made its way into the popular consciousness.  In summary it suggests that those who are more incompetent at a particular task are also more likely to overrate their competence, since their ignorance prevents them from realising just how bad they are. Anyway, I finally got around to reading the article , "Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments", by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 1999, Vol 77, No 6.  Much of it is not scintillating reading, being after all an academic research paper filled with statistical jargon.  However, it is more comprehensible than many similar articles and shot through with flashes of psychologist humour. The paper reports a series of four linked studies.  All were carried out on undergra...

To make sure I don't just get trapped in a single viewpoint, I've been reading John Ortberg's Faith and Doubt.   Ortberg is an American Presbyterian pastor and also coincidentally a former clinical psychologist.  His overall outlook seems to be basically orthodox, conservative Protestantism but he is not really in the "fundamentalist" camp in that he is not a believer in the literal seven day creation, nor in premillenialism.  He has written this book to deal with the question of doubt.  Why do Christians doubt, what should they do about it, and how does doubt relate to faith?  He deals with the issue in a chatty, anecdotal style, keeping it light and easy and leaping from story to story, topic to topic, with the agility of a grasshopper.  Although he doesn't say so, I suspect that the material in this book started out as a set of sermons, and it still sounds like something meant to be spoken, peppered with jokes that are often quite funny ...

Courtesy of my friend Kay I've been reading a book by Gregory Jenks called The Once and Future Bible: An Introduction to the Bible for Religious Progressives.   Jenks is Academic Dean of St Francis Theological College, the Anglican seminary here in Brisbane.  He is also strongly connected with the "progressive" Christian movement in the USA as a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar  and a friend of the radical former Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong , to whom he refers as a kind of mentor. Despite his association with Spong, Jenks is very much his own person.  Spong's comparable book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, is combative and quixotic, leaping unpredictably between mainstream scholarship like the source theory of the Gospels, and fringe ideas like the notion of the Apostle Paul as a repressed gay man.  By contrast, Jenks is calm and sober, providing a concise lay person's summary of what he sees as the current state of Biblical ...

Here's a little something that Crossan and Reed's Excavating Jesus has got me thinking about.  They open their book with a discussion of an artefact called the "James Ossuary" - a bone box inscribed with the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus".  Their analysis of this relic, sold in the antiquities market with no indication of its origin, is fascinating.  Apparently even if the inscription is genuine there is only a one in 20 chance it actually contains the bones of James, the brother of Jesus Christ as worshipped by Christians.  All three names were incredibly common in first century Palestine. Be that as it may, it leads them into a reflection on the role of James in the early church, and the origin of Christianity as a Jewish reform movement.  Here is my version of it, inspired by theirs but a little different. James the brother of Jesus (as opposed to James the son of Zebedee, brother of John) is only mentioned once by name in...

So Roo said to me that after reading Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain I should read Jonah Lehrer's The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind.   I always aim to please and I did enjoy Shermer. Lehrer is one of those annoying people who seem good at lots of things.  He has a degree in neuroscience, studied literature and theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and writes for a number of different publications.  Where Shermer is a scientist who writes, Lehrer appears to be a writer who does science.  He is less technical than Shermer, more journalistic and accessible. The Decisive Moment  (apparently marketed in some countries as How We Decide ) covers a lot of the same territory as The Believing Brain , including reporting many of the same experiments.  However, Lehrer asks a different question to Shermer and so of course he gets a different answer.  Shermer is interested in belief, and his conclusion is that we should reject ...

William James is supposed to have said, "Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."  Courtesy of a tip from Roo and the friendly folk at the Brisbane City Council library service, I've finally got my hands on Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , which explains this aphorism in a lot more detail. I previously encountered Shermer through his Why People Believe Weird Things , a fun journey through a set of beliefs on the edge of the intellectual world like Holocaust denial, alien abduction, Ayn Rand's Objectivism and the psi quotient.  Shermer revealed himself as an intensely curious, sympathetic but highly skeptical observer, constantly on the hunt for evidence.  The Believing Brain covers some of the same territory but it's a much more technical book dealing with the question from the point of view of Shermer's own specialist field, neuro-psychology.  What it is about our brains, S...

Some of my rellies, along with various other people, are currently involved in an attempt to break the world record for the longest Facebook thread.  The subject is, of course, abortion.  The thread is currently up to 380 comments plus various likes and dislikes.  They would have broken the record by now except that the host deleted the original thread in a valiant attempt to enforce some minimum standards of courtesy. I've carefully refrained from participating.  I've previously tried to bring some ethical nuance to this debate, but I've found it doesn't help much because no-one is listening.  So my latest idea is that we should dramatise the abortion debate as a kind of Flash Mob event, like this one  in a food court, with people popping up from opposite ends of the room to advocate their positions.  In my head it sounds a little like the third section of Bohemian Rhapsody . Pro-lifer 1: Don't kill babies! Pro-choicer 1: They're just c...

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about a facebook discussion I was part of a while ago over Divided , an American documentary film which argues that "modern youth ministry is contrary to Scripture".  The argument got a little heated (not from me, I was polite).  This morning I woke up thinking about the broader context for it. The message of Divided is that youth ministry, as in having a youth group as part of your church, is wrong because it divides families.  Proper ministry is ministry to the whole family, together.  Various Bible verses are quoted out of context to support this view and selective stories about youth groups are used to show they corrupt young people and lead to poor outcomes. So from my description you can already see what I think.  My parents had grown up going to church and had no interest in going back.  At the age of 14 my school friend invited me to a church youth group and I was introduce...