Posts by cognisonance

76

By “evolution,” we mean “macroevolution”—apes turning into humans, for example.

by FadingTruth in

august 2015 awake .

quote in title taken from article footnote.. anyone have information on who gene hwang and yan-der hsuuw in the article are?.

why do they repeatedly state that apes turned to humans when that's not what evolutionists teach at all?.

cognisonance

Regarding the classic evolution iconography (what most think is an a modern ape -> us transition), this has long been argued to be a very bad way to covey evolution to the average person. What people think of as apes today are just what they see at the zoo. But in science humans are apes. Us along with Bonobos, Orangutans, and others came from a common ancestor, an extinct ape unlike those in the zoo today, which in turn came from an extinct common ancestor among primate.

The graphics also incorrectly depicts evolution as a goal oriented process, such that a primate made progress to becoming an enlightened human. All of this is just wrong. I remember Stephen J. Gould talking about this in the book Wonderful Life. He labels this iconograph as the "icon of progress". Here is a picture from that book I believe showing how popular it become (making it's way into advertising):

There are better ways to graphically depict evolution. This essentially is probably the worst way to do so. For better ways read more here.

A more common way to represent evolution is phylogenetic trees such as these:

4

Are we all self-deceived?

by cognisonance in

jw
friends

i recently read a interesting paper in the behavioral and brain sciences journal entitled, the evolution and psychology of self-deception.

in it (section 5 particularly) it talks about what the researchers claim to be varieties of self-deception (note that the linked paper has peer review responses as well that suggest that there might be some misclassification to what is considered to be "self-deception"*):.

biased information searching amount of searchingselective searchingselective attentionbiased interpretationmisrememberingrationalizationconvincing the self that a lie is trueself-deception accompanied/unaccompanied by neurological damageof the categories above, i found biased information searching and biased interpretation to be the most interesting.

cognisonance

Was thinking about this post earlier today. Bumping for new comers.

35

New on here

by Tony Stark in

hey so i'm new on here.

just wanted to introduce myself.

in my 20's and was rasied one, and very popular among the jw community.

cognisonance

Hi Tony, I also lost my friends and family about the same time ago and am in my early 30s. It's rough, but the good news is that you will find more friends and have have better experiences in life outside the cult.

41

How Do You Feel About All The Time You Wasted Being. A Jehovah's Witness?

by minimus in

jw
friends

all that i can say is....what a shame!

cognisonance

Considering how I always regretted not going as far in my university studies (I stopped at an Associates degree specifically because of college being discouraged in the cult), it feels like one big missed opportunity. I didn't leave until I was nearly 30 (born-in). Now, I'm back in school working on my B.Sc. degree. I regret that I haven't finished, or even started, my MS and/or PhD by now. Being a JW has been a lost decade educationally for me. Additionally, I resent the suppression of my intellectual curiosity and critical thinking that I was subjected to.

It wasn't all bad, that's true, but looking for a silver lining in a cult is like asking Andy Dufresne how he felt about the nearly 20 years he wasted as an innocent person in the Shawshank State Prison. Sure he made a good friend and had a few laughs now and then, but after literally crawling thru a mile of shit he couldn't have been happier to have gotten the hell out.

21

Interesting Pew Stats on JWs--Alarming Trends for the Borg

by Cadellin in

someone may have linked to this already, but the this interactive page in the pew religion study is pretty interesting, especially when you look at the trends for jw between 2007 and 2014. here's what it shows:.

jws are increasingly non-white.

in fact, the percentage of white jws has decreased from 2007 to 2014 by 12%, while hispanic jws have increased by 8%.

cognisonance

I'm also no statistician but am learning more about the subject everyday. I just finished an undergraduate, junior-level Applied Statistics course.

While the sample size is large for the entire study it's a bit small for JWs. They warn about this in their charts and point to this diagram. Sample size for JWs is between ~200-250 depending on the chart/table/trend:

So if I read this right, If in 2007 40% were men, and in 2014, 35%, the "error bars" could be from 36-44 and 31-39 respectively, which overlap each other.

21

Interesting Pew Stats on JWs--Alarming Trends for the Borg

by Cadellin in

someone may have linked to this already, but the this interactive page in the pew religion study is pretty interesting, especially when you look at the trends for jw between 2007 and 2014. here's what it shows:.

jws are increasingly non-white.

in fact, the percentage of white jws has decreased from 2007 to 2014 by 12%, while hispanic jws have increased by 8%.

cognisonance

There is another tread on this same study: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/263880001/pew-research-study-on-religion

Also I did some analysis of the tends and only the non-white trend is statistically significant at 5% CI. I'll reproduce that post here:

I did some frequentest statistics (proportion hypothesis testing) for data that had sample size values. And all but the increase in non-white demographics are not statistically significant at the 5% level (meaning due to random sampling it's unlikely to tell us anything, like the percentage of men in 2014 being 35% compared to 40% in 2007 - it's very likely that the proportion of men have remained the same in the past 7 years, same goes for proportions of young, poor, and educated. Though at the 10% confidence level, the decrease in young people would be significant, so I suppose more data would be helpful to be more confidence in that finding).

Increase in non-white demographics: p=0.005744

Decrease in men: p=0.1619

Decrease in people aged 18-29: p=0.07628

Increase in those with college education: p=0.1077

Increase in those making less than $30,000: p=0.1431

If anyone wants to check my work, here is my code from R, and you can get the data from this pdf (for the proportion tests I took the percentages and multiplied them by the sample size and rounded, so there is some loss of accuracy in my tests as a resullt.

4

Pew research study on religion

by Ignoranceisbliss in

this is a really interesting study on religion that includes some info on witnesses.

it's interesting that dubs have the highest percentage of non white members (64%).

also interesting that there are twice the number of mormons than witnesses.

cognisonance

It's even worse when put in context of a comparison:

4

Pew research study on religion

by Ignoranceisbliss in

this is a really interesting study on religion that includes some info on witnesses.

it's interesting that dubs have the highest percentage of non white members (64%).

also interesting that there are twice the number of mormons than witnesses.

cognisonance

Interesting and thanks for posting. I remember their first study/survey 7 years ago.

I did some frequentest statistics (proportion hypothesis testing) for data that had sample size values. And all but the increase in non-white demographics are not statistically significant at the 5% level (meaning due to random sampling it's unlikely to tell us anything, like the percentage of men in 2014 being 35% compared to 40% in 2007 - it's very likely that the proportion of men have remained the same in the past 7 years, same goes for proportions of young, poor, and educated. Though at the 10% confidence level, the decrease in young people would be significant, so I suppose more data would be helpful to be more confidence in that finding).

Increase in non-white demographics: p=0.005744

Decrease in men: p=0.1619

Decrease in people aged 18-29: p=0.07628

Increase in those with college education: p=0.1077

Increase in those making less than $30,000: p=0.1431

If anyone wants to check my work, here is my code from R, and you can get the data from this pdf (for the proportion tests I took the percentages and multiplied them by the sample size and rounded, so there is some loss of accuracy in my tests as a resullt.

16

Do you think the 'Rama Singh misquote' situation is uncalled for?

by neat blue dog in

let's be honest with ourselves, even if you have an ax to grind with the wts.

i mean, the quote in question was merely a statement of what he believed to be a fact, or else he wouldn't have said it.

there was nothing in the quote (and everyone has the right to make accurate quotes under the fair use doctrine), that even remotely suggested that he was pro-creationism or anything like that.

cognisonance

cognisonanance: "Awake is trying to make it sound like there are valid reasons to not believe in evolution, and is trying to use Sighn's statement of fact that a 'great many' of scientifically minded do not believe in evolution as an example of a valid reason."
Which is perfectly fine. It's apparent to pretty much anyone that they're quoting him because he's in the scientific community and has an opinion about his colleagues, not because of any sympathy to creationism. Anything anyone says in public is a fact, and doesn't need permission to be published in support of a certain cause.

For some reason this forum software truncated my post. I meant to explain why. As Memphis pointed out, the context of Signh's quote is that a great many (notice not a majority by the way) of educated peopled don't accept evolution because they haven't really understood it. That there are pedagogical issues with how biology is taught and students often aren't able or helped to see the connections between the life they study (and also see day to day) and evolutionary theory throughout their studies and lives. There are numerous reasons for this he brings out, beyond just conflicts of interest such as a religious bias before study. Most people haven't traveled the world and observed the variation in life to the extent needed to really see the results of evolution. These are just of a few points he made if I recall correctly.

The problem with the Awake quote is not one of quoting out of context at the sentence or paragraph. But one of quoting out of context at the level of a complete work, his entire essay. To fail to mention this context and the gist of his argument, is to distort what he was trying to say and use his statement to sound like evidence to support a very different claim. This is hiding information that disagrees with one's argument, and only providing the information to readers that seems to support it. This is what intellectually dishonesty is, and it's akin to only telling half the truth.

Put another way, Signh's argument could be summarized to be, "A great many of educated people oppose evolution, but this is in part due to the subset of their education dealing with biology being inadequate and pedagogically flawed." The Awake is effectively only quoting the first part of this paraphrase.

16

Do you think the 'Rama Singh misquote' situation is uncalled for?

by neat blue dog in

let's be honest with ourselves, even if you have an ax to grind with the wts.

i mean, the quote in question was merely a statement of what he believed to be a fact, or else he wouldn't have said it.

there was nothing in the quote (and everyone has the right to make accurate quotes under the fair use doctrine), that even remotely suggested that he was pro-creationism or anything like that.

cognisonance

The quotation is not a misquote, the Awake does quote his works correctly and did not twist their meaning. However, it's still out of context and is intellectually dishonest to quote Rama Signh given the context of the Awake article. Awake is trying to make it sound like there are valid reasons to not believe in evolution, and is trying to use Sighn's statement of fact that a 'great many' of scientifically minded do not believe in evolution as an example of a valid reason.