thinktoomuch.net

Nick Kristof’s Sunday column, When Donations Go Astray, is entirely on the topic I started with my previous post. He warns about inefficient charities, for some only 21% of your donation actually reaches the needy. (For convenience, click through to it via a Google search. Go read the column.)

In particular Nick warns religious givers, who tend to donate more than the non-religious, that merely sharing your religious label does not mean the charity makes good use of the money you give them. He gives examples of an inefficient Christian charity and Jewish and Islamic charities that contribute to extremism and violence.

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2010.

I’ve decided this is the year I start giving — my charitable contributions until now have not been significant. There were a couple of things encouraging me lately, I must confess the thing that finally pushed me over the threshold was a silly little tax thing, i.e. selfishly motivated.

The tax form I had to fill in permits a deduction for charitable contributions. I’m told I can fill in a certain number there even if I didn’t make a contribution, since the authorities don’t challenge the numbers, don’t insist on proof, unless they’re large enough. Except, I have this honest bone in my body that insisted I fill in a zero there. It left me feeling cheated since most other people aren’t that honest (aka stupid). The simple solution? Actually donate to charity so that I can honestly deduct it from taxes! (Note: I’m not in South Africa anymore, I don’t know what the South African tax policies are.)

So yes, I will be giving money away so that I will no longer feel cheated. And I will be giving away much more than I would save in taxes if I simply fill in that small number every year.

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A piece of wisdom I got from my father:

Diet Coke makes you fat! Easy to prove too, simply look at the people drinking Diet Coke, they’re all fat!

Wise words indeed, because they were said in jest, illustrating a very important point. While discussing this important point, ignore the fact that both thin and fat people drink both “Diet” and normal drinks. With two variables under consideration, (A) people drinking Diet Coke, and (B) people that are fat:

• Discovery: all people drinking Diet Coke are fat — (A) and (B) is correlated
• Naive conclusion: consuming Diet Coke makes you fat — correlation doesn’t mean (A) causes (B) (see footnote 1)
• Rather more likely: fat people are ordering Diet Coke because they want to lose weight: being fat causes Diet Coke consumption — maybe rather (B) causes (A)!

This joke illustrates the fact that correlation does not mean causation. For another example, consider “people that smoke” and “people with lung cancer”. Simply finding that these two are correlated does not mean that smoking causes cancer!

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Brandon of the blog named Siris wrote a post on Immanuel Kant’s guide to a good dinner party.

On Kant’s view dining alone is bad for a philosopher: it encourages ‘intellectual self-gnawing’ that leads to a lack of vitality. Eating with at least one other companion, on the other hand, allows for a good interchange of ideas.

I’m sure I would have avoided some of my madness if I did have regular dinner parties or more directly duelled with others on some of the ideas of those months. Academic life’s deadline didn’t permit me that luxury though, I felt. More from Brandon’s post, Kant on philosophy induced insanity:

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I will always remember going for runs with my father. I don’t remember how often we did that, it was simply one of those activities you do, as a human, to take good care of yourself. Consequently I didn’t think of myself as a runner — I was actually in the process of becoming a swimmer.

My decision to run, to be a runner, came nearly a decade later, when I entered my first half marathon. (I believe it was in 2002, in April, the race being the Safari half marathon on 1 May.) I did run occasionally before then, but to find motivation to even pretend to train regularly, I had to have some goals to work towards.

I have since branched out into the occasional triathlon, or just cycling or mountain biking on its own, and when the opportunity presents itself, I also do paddling. In fact, my father used to paddle, so that’s also special. Having never paddled together though, there’s something special behind running — those memories. I remember fragments of our runs, I remember some of our regular routes, and I remember words shouted back at me as I fell behind on the downhills:

Rek jou treë!

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In some ways similar to selection bias, confirmation bias is the tendency for people to favour information that agrees with their preconceptions or beliefs, regardless of whether it is actually true.

Confirmation bias is an example of a cognitive bias, a human trait, whereas selection bias is typically a methodological error in a scientific study. The results can be similar: evidence against some hypothesis can be suppressed while evidence for it is overemphasized. However, with selection bias the emphasis depends on the selection error that is made, while confirmation bias the emphasis lies with whatever the person’s existing beliefs are, effectively in favour of they would like to be true.

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There are many mistakes one can make when setting up a scientific study. Awareness of such mistakes and biases is very important so that we can avoid drawing false conclusions from bad data. Today I’m briefly introducing selection bias.

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Today I again stumbled on an old article I bookmarked/miniblogged on November 6, 2008 (two days after Obama won the election). Titled The American void, Simon Critchley wrote about the role of belief and faith in Obama’s worldview, and the nature of his conversion to Christianity. It was the musings on the “anthropologist’s distance” that really caught my attention back then.

What I want to touch on in this post is what is discussed in this paragraph:

Why do we need religion? Obama recognizes that people turn to religion because they want “a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toil of daily life.” The alternative is clear: nihilism. The latter means “to travel down a long highway toward nothingness.” Religion satisfies the need for a fullness to experience, a transcendence that fills the void. Obama’s path to Christianity plays out against the background of his anthropologist mother’s respectful distance from religion.

It connects with a previous post of mine, Our Narratives.

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How do you think about the future? How does the past influence you? Do you live “in the moment”, is that something to strive towards?

Dr. Philip Zimbardo gave a talk at RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) about time perspectives. He discusses past orientated, present orientated and future orientated perspectives (and two of each), and the impact these perspectives have on how we live our lives. The talk is 41 minutes long, but RSA also posted a 10 minute condensed version. The condensed version is sufficient to give an overview, get those mental cogs turning, and maybe kickstart a conversation. Take a look:

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In Many Faiths, One Truth, an op-ed in the NY Times, the Dalai Lama (a Buddhist leader of religious officials of the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism) calls for religious tolerance, for finding common ground among faiths, bridging needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever.

I couldn’t agree more. I think pluralism is the only way forward. Rather let me rephrase, it is an essential ingredient in our way forward. I easily become a fan of any religious leader that persistently encourages openness to the good found in traditions not their own.

Let me not detract from the article with further commentary just yet. Go read it.