1) But when you discuss biases the issue of objectivity is almost always relevant, as it is here. The whole premise of your blog post related to the way fact is reported, and how we misconstrue and characterize others in a group of our peers. This comes directly into play when you are forced to make the decision of which comments are important to include in a documentary. It is perfectly acceptable to show pieces of information that portray a action or group as doing something wrong, if you truly believe that they are having a pernicious effect on society, and present honestly what led you to your decision, I see nothing wrong with this.

2) While that information may be interesting, and may be a good idea for documentary makers in the future, it is not a necessity for honesty or completeness. Ted Haggard using crystal meth with a male hooker while preaching that homosexuality is an abomination is the story — not his later mishmash of denials and admissions. And the film IS effective on the in-group. My brother, a Christian himself, was deeply disturbed by the movie, and I know many others are as well. When I see a fair vilification of an atheist — for example, someone who is actively cruel and mocking toward believers, who uses spaghetti logic to support a smug sense of superiority (I’m looking at you, Bill Maher). I have a desire to distance myself from them, to realize that this IS a problem, and I should try to avoid it. If I see someone beat their child unconscious in a supermarket for knocking over a display, I don’t feel how they would defend their actions is relevant — nothing they could say could change their original action. It might be interesting to see how they justify such a heinous act, but it is not unfairly biased to write an account of only of the incident when discussing bad parenting. It is, however, a very serious problem if I made the story up and reported it as fact (which is what “Expelled” did.)

3.) It’s called the fundamental attribution error. But it is also a mistake to think that all of the results of the above test is due to that. A man who thinks mullets look good will try to give himself a mullet. A woman who thinks that big hair is sexy will try to have a beehive. And the familiarity of features will prevent an abnormality from jumping out at you. And there is strong evidence to suggest people are attracted to people who share features of their own face — not out of narcissism, but simply out of acclimatization. Sorry, tangential, I know.

I understand the concern, but I feel that it isn’t true when dealing with “Jesus Camp”. It would be wrong to imply that the film was unfairly biased because it didn’t allow the pastor to reply to the film as a whole. The film was trying to show that lines that shouldn’t have been crossed were crossed. It does a very good job of this, and it shouldn’t be considered skewed or unfair. If someone gets convicted of a crime, the prosecution shouldn’t be considered unfair for not including how they rationalized the crime to themselves. The intent of the trial, as was the intent of the movie, is to show that a wrong was being committed, and how the wrong is affecting public discourse. And While I have no problems with understanding in the literal sense, too often a certain subset of liberals mean by it “focus on motivation, events that evoke pity, and equivocations until you stop feeling that the person was wrong in doing something wrong.” The wrong should also be part of the understanding.

And finally, although this is slightly tangential, sometimes people DO simply lack introspection. The pastor herself is a good example of this: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2501819&page=1 . Look at her remarks, for example, about Disney promoting witchcraft on page three.

Here’s my response to yours:
1. I’m not addressing the objectivity of truth. My views (and yours) on that are irrelevant to the discussion, since the discussion isn’t about it. What it *is* about is addressing the _process_ by which people try to understand each other, and how they perceive the “other”-ness. I’m also talking about how people choose to share information with their in-group about their personal perceptions of outgroups.

2. I re-read the article, and I think I can summarize it down to a shorter point: It bothers me that when we observe others, we don’t ask those others we observe if they agree with our short-hand descriptions of them, and pass that information along with the observation itself.

I’m saying it would be more interesting to hear both that someone said, “Niggers live like dogs.”, and when asked if they were racist or if they thought it was possibly an offensive comment, they replied “No.”, than to hear just the observation itself – them saying “Niggers live like dogs.”. This links back to why I think Jesus Camp, though neutral in its format, is still self-serving and biased. If they cut the film, then showed it to the people in the film, and included an “extras” DVD feature of the people portrayed in the film talking about how they felt about their portrayal in the film, I think it would be much more revealing than the film itself. I think the fact that, after this film was released, the camp disbanded, then moved and re-named itself, says something about how they felt about their own portrayal in the film. I’m not sympathizing with them as “victims” of portrayal, I’m just observing that the extra information – knowing what their reaction is to their own portrayal in a film – is more revealing than the film itself. I can’t help but wonder why we don’t include that as an extra “featurette” part documentaries that’s optional to see, but nonetheless part of the package. Then the documentary is more a discussion between people than a one-sided viewpoint that can’t be rebutted by the party being observed.

3. Something else I thought of – as a general social example, consider that we have a lot of data on what people look like (pictures), but also what they think about how they look (surveys). If you were to show someone an array of pictures spanning from ugly to attractive in even steps (in some “scientific”/”objective” fashion), and then told them that 70% of them considered themselves attractive (“above average”), this reveals something more than the fact that we have a variety of attractiveness – it also tells us that people think highly of themselves even if, in the objective comparison sense, they don’t have a reason to. Knowing what people look like, but also what they think of how they look, tells us much more about people than just the first part.

My overall point: I’m just concerned that we don’g get an important part of the puzzle when forming opinions about others – their perception of how we view them. This can shape *so* much of how opposing groups interact with each other. I also think it’s much more damaging to view people as inhuman, or that they aren’t introspective. So many are introspective, or at least reactive to their reflection in the biased-mirror (the other person’s viewpoint), and yet we don’t consider that part of a person very important when trying to understand them.

Is there something about this concern that you disagree with?

Not every documentary that attempts to show their own side is dishonest. Not every edit of an interview is inherently mendacious. Not every person who has reached a conclusion and seeks to convince others is the enemy of objectivity. If you’re writing a paper about Nixon, it’s not necessary to quote six paragraphs ahead and six paragraphs below to establish “they (the Mexicans) don’t live like a bunch of dogs which the Negroes do live like” as a racist statement. It’s completely fair to bring that up as point against Nixon.

“Expelled” was dishonest in it’s METHODOLOGY, which “Jesus Camp” wasn’t (Which is why “Expelled” sent me into such a rage). They made several completely erroneous statement — hell, more than erroneous, they were outright lies — because there’s is simply no way that they could have simply overlooked so many fundamental facts so frequently, and only in self-serving ways. “Jesus Camp” depicting moments that seem bizarre to an outside observer isn’t a form of rhetorical treachery devised to deceive the viewer. If you had been one of the film’s makers, those moments would stick out in your mind. If someone had asked you “what was it like?”, you probably would have included some of those incidents as part of the story. A small child weeping uncontrollably while confessing his “sin” of doubt IS something that deserves to be part of the story.

A quick rhetorical question: which of these is a more honest reply to “How was your day?”:
1) The day was awful. I woke up an hour late, missed the bus, had to call cab to get to work, had the asshole boss yell at me for missing my meeting with our client. I scraped through the rest of the day okay, but I felt like crap the whole time.
2) Arrived at work at 08:50, informed that of late arrival had caused me to miss meeting w/ client, worked on Jenkins account until 12:40. Went to lunch at 13:05 and came back at 13:35. Work on Sandez account til 16:00 at which point I went home.

The first is obviously a more biased account. It has more emotion, less information, and more interpretation. And yet the second is, paradoxically, less honest. It presents an inaccurately mundane picture of the day, whitewashes the altercation with the boss, and completely hides the fact that he felt his work was impaired. It has more information, yes, but the extraneous data isn’t salient, and merely distracts from
the question. Interpretation isn’t the enemy of objectivity — dishonesty is. And “Expelled” is very, very dishonest, while the only quibble I had with “Jesus Camp” was the ubiquitous cuts to the radio host to provide exegesis. She shouldn’t use talking heads to express your views unless you feel they made a particular good idea you want to give them credit for. If you feel the point is implicit, it doesn’t need a voice, and if the point needs to be made explicit, take responsibility for the message of the film and have the narrator make it.

Noticing a cognitive biases is a double-edged sword. There is always the danger of OVER-correcting – of realizing that we tend to see the world in all black and white and end up calling the zebra gray. In in-grouping and out-grouping, that danger is made manifest when people start to humanize that which is morally repugnant, or begin to equivocate fact to appease a sense of fairness. The Khmer Rouge wasn’t bad because of my cultural biases, but because the ideas and people behind it were fundamentally foolish and evil. The people who believed that the world was flat were wrong. People who argue that thetans cause disease are mistaken. People who argue that I shouldn’t act so sure damn well better be willing to argue that the world is flat, or that Cambodian genocide was for the best, or that disease comes from from a volcano. To say “you only THINK you’re right” is the basest aspersion on a belief. If I shouldn’t think I’m right, convince me I’m wrong — tell me WHY. Don’t try to convince me that there is no truth, unless you honestly believe there is no truth, or no objective reality.

What I object to in “Expelled” is the lying, and blatant demagoguery of the film. I am a democrat, but feel interested when I read William F. Buckley and George Will. If I read Sean Hannity, or for that matter, Andrea Dworkin, I have a disgusting feeling that there arguments are not made to be useful to people, but merely to use people. I’ve read a lot of christian apologists without being offended by them. I am not enraged by “Expelled”’s ideology, but its methodology. To the filmmakers, lying is okay — it’s just Pious Fraud. And that’s what “Expelled” was all about.

I’m not one to dwell on movement politics, but Sam Harris’ recent exhortation to shed the “atheist” label has struck a chord, and may be worthy of a second look (and wanton embrace) by humanists. At the Atheist Alliance Internat…

If you like the 21 unconvincing arguments you might like:
http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm