I addressed that already and, no, individual variation does not provide a counterexample to an easily demonstrable broad tendency.

This is a "no true Scotsman" argument. There are plenty of atheists who do think religion is bad and wish to stamp it out. You need only read /. regularly to encounter plenty of them.

You're projecting your particular approach across a broad group of people. Further, you're also projecting some sort of opinions on me, opinions which I don't hold.

Advertisers absolutely have complained that Google doesn't provide them with information about users. Google won't even give advertisers much control over the demographic targeting of their ads, which annoys them even more. The reason advertisers are willing to put up with it is, quite simple, because Google is better at targeting than the advertisers themselves, and can prove it. Google provides advertisers with extensive tools to analyze the impact and effectiveness of their ads, and to verify that they are in fact achieving positive ROI.

If you want to see how this stuff works you can do it for yourself. Create an account and go look at the tools Google offers. For that matter, you can even spend a few dollars and run an ad campaign of your own for whatever is of interest to you, and you can look at the data Google provides in return.

You might be tempted to argue "But, yeah, that's because that's the system Google gives to pissants like me... *big* advertisers get more." That's also untrue. I can't tell you a way to test that for yourself, except to find a person at a major company or advertising agency and get them to show you, but I'll tell you as someone who worked on some of the underpinnings of those systems that big or small, advertisers get the same UIs and the same data regardless of size. The only variation I'm aware of is that advertising agencies, who manage campaigns on behalf of large numbers of advertisers, get better tools for aggregating and separating the sets of campaigns they're managing.

Because they're human, and that need is quite clearly a nearly-universal human trait, as evidenced by the fact that every human society everywhere has believed in some form of gods, or powers.

Oh, some people feel the need less acutely than others. Such people are pretty comfortable not believing in anything, but they find themselves unable to convince their fellows who do feel the need. For anti-religionists, finding something to fulfill that human need is pretty important, because if they can't, then they'll never be able to convince the majority of humans to abandon religion.

Don't anthropomorphize science. It hates that.

You're absolutely right that science doesn't need to place value on anything. Science is a process, a methodology and, to a lesser extent, a culture. It doesn't have needs. And yet besides being completely right, you also completely miss the point.

Science doesn't need anything, atheism doesn't need anything... but people do need something. People find the emotionless, purely rational "Spock" view of science deeply unfulfilling (ignoring for the moment that spock wasn't wholly rational or emotionless, and neither was Data, even without his emotion chip), and therefore they seek something else, something more, something, in fact, bigger than themselves which (somewhat paradoxically) gives value to them and makes them more than just "chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet", as Hawking put it. Otherwise, what's the point? Different people feel this need in varying degrees, and atheists tend to be people who are towards the less "needy" end of that particular spectrum (which doesn't make them superior or inferior).

Atheists who see religion as a problem to be solved, and wish to convince people to stop seeking gods find this need for something in their religious fellows to be an obstacle... because the atheists have nothing to offer to fill that human need. At least, that's the argument.

I recently read a book which I think has an excellent answer to this. The book is "The Beginning of Infinity", by David Deutsch, and in it Deutsch makes a compelling argument that, rather than being irrelevant chemical scum, people (a term which Deutsch defines, and of which humans are the only example we know) are objectively the single most significant phenomenon in the universe (actually, the multiverse, since Deuetsch is a proponent of the many-worlds hypothesis). The reason we're so incredibly important not only provides value but also purpose, and I think that value and purpose can fill the need.

Deutsch argues that the reason humans have become people and therefore important is because we've made "the jump to universality", by which Deutsch means that we have become "universal explainers", capable of developing an infinite stream of ever-better and ever-more-detailed explanations of how the universe works, and therefore also "universal constructors", capable ultimately (given the necessary knowledge, which we have the capacity to obtain) of constructing anything which is not physically impossible (note that universal construction also implies the ability to overcome any inherent deficits in our brains that might impose limits on our capacity as universal explainers).

As to how those characteristics make us the most important phenomena in the universe, Deutsch provides several examples. I'll relate two of them. First, he points out that we believe -- with reason -- that if there are other people in the universe it is highly likely that we will be able to detect them, even if they're hundreds, thousands or millions of light years away. This belief is the rationale for the SETI project, and it is based on the simple observation that people, when they become radio engineers, produce signals which are distinguishable from any phenomenon that exists in a universe without people. More succinctly, people are one of few phenomena which can be detected over interstellar distances. This puts people in a class of cosmic significance that at least rivals that of stars.

Second, he points out that as universal constructors, who can ultimately create any arrangement of matter and energy which is not prohibited by the laws of physics, once we learn how, that we're actually more significant than stars, supernovae, quasars, etc. It's conceivable that we will someday learn how to harness and modify those vast phenomena, for example we may someday wish to prevent a supernova and do so by removing enough mass from the star to prevent it. We don't know how to do that, of course, but we already know exactly what would have to be done, exactly how much mass would have to be removed from a given star, and by when.

Further, if we consider the set of all possible arrangements of matter and energy in the universe and then consider which of them could occur via the operation of the laws of physics in the absence of people, vs which could occur in the presence of people (universal constructors), we see that only a vanishingly small set of states is possible without people. The classic example is that of Paley's "pocket watch on the heath"... what is the probability that in the absence of people that a pocket watch would come into existence? The watch's structure is not only intricate, it is all geared toward the purpose of telling time. It's extremely unlikely that that arrangement of atoms could occur by chance. Of course, the same argument can be applied to our own bodies, but we do have an explanation for how they could occur by chance.

So, the cosmic significance and importance of people, as universal explainers and constructors, clearly fulfills our human need to be significant. We, collectively (including other non-human people), are the most significant and powerful thing in the universe. But how does that address the need for a purpose larger than ourselves? The purpose is to achieve our destiny, of creating that infinite stream of knowledge, and of applying it to better the existence of people. In a word, progress, making people, collectively and individually, happier, smarter, better, freer, more powerful, etc. through developing ever-richer explanations of the universe we inhabit -- and create.

Note that this still leaves open the question of how to create and justify morality, something that normal people feel is important, and another key role of religion that atheists sometimes have a hard time replacing. Relativist, or amoralist philosophies abound, and can be logically very consistent, but are almost universally unappealing to people. Deutsch takes a stab at that, too, arguing that morality is also objective and can be derived from the laws of nature (physics). His arguments there are interesting but not quite as compelling.

(Disclaimer: Note that I am not an atheist. I do believe in God, and believe that He is our creator and the creator of the universe we inhabit. However, I find objective arguments of humanity's importance and morality's fundamental nature very interesting, and not in the slightest in conflict with my view of a benificent creator who wants us to find fulfillment in our struggles to progress.)

You say that as though it's some sort of moral issue, as though science has somehow failed to provide you with what you deserve. I don't understand that. We know what we know (though much of what we know is wrong), and we're learning. Saying we should know any given thing that we don't know is silly, because given that we don't know it, we don't even know what is required in order to know it.

In the case of the effect of red meat, just how deep does that particular rabbit hole go? We don't really know. We have a rough understanding of many of the mechanisms involved, but no comprehensive understanding of how it all fits together, much less how it interacts with other elements. We can look at empiricist[*] studies but the plethora of confounding factors make those particularly weak in this case. Simple phenomena can be described via empirical methods. Even emergent phenomena with very complex underpinnings can be described empirically, as long as they're simple at the level of explanation. But when phenomena are inherently complex, only deep explanation will suffice.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if we're still 50 years from the level of knowledge that you demand. It's probably not that bad, but it might be, because we are barely scratching the surface at understanding the complexity of our own bodies.

[*] By "empiricist" I mean the sort of semi-science that assumes that descriptive knowledge derived from observation, without any real explanatory theory, is scientific rather than just being a narrow rule of thumb whose applicability is uncertain. In this case, measuring health outcomes and correlating them with red meat intake and then using the result to predict what red meat intake choices produce the best outcomes. The approach is flawed not only because it often confuses correlation with causation (though it does), or because it's hard to isolate the studied factor from confounding factors (it is), but because without explanatory knowledge that tells us not only what the effects of red meat are but also exactly why they are what they are, we can never really know how other choices will interact.

Could you elaborate?

That's a particularly weak example, since for everyday purposes we knew how to deal with gravity long before we had any scientific understanding of it at all.

Turns out that biology is a little bit more complicated than we expected.

The influence of Norteamericano (a misnomer, since México is also part of Norteamérica) politics has boned México, but not so much because of our political corruption but because of our failed drug policy. The really horrible drug violence problems they're facing now are a result of caving to US pressure to try to stop the flow of drugs through Mexico. The attempt failed utterly, as anyone with a brain knew it was going to, and it turned the Mexican drug traffickers into ultra-violent thugs. The relatively peaceful traffickers from 20 years ago were imprisoned or killed, and the guys who replace them are seriously nasty.

Keep in mind that your statement has been true since the dawn of the age if scientific reasoning -- basically, the enlightenment -- and will be true forever. The only way that it will ever end is if we stop learning and just stick with believing in the erroneous beliefs we currently hold. Because our current knowledge will always contain a lot of errors.

Obviously, I'm speaking more broadly than just medicine and nutrition. The subjects about which we're rapidly overturning much of what we know drift around, but any scientific society will always be in the process of overthrowing old ideas as accumulating evidence and improving conjectures generate new knowledge.

This is often a problem with scientific progress. A hypothesis that seems reasonable and has some experimental support arises, but it takes years and a lot of work and money to test the implications of the hypothesis. And even when that is done, future research can still find that there were subtleties that, when understood, dramatically change the conclusion.

In the mean time, people have to live and have to make decisions. Science provides the best guide we have for doing that even though it's nearly always flawed in unknown ways. So, what do we do? Refuse to act until we've found all the answers? Obviously not. Instead, we have to act on the best knowledge we have at the time -- though applying a little bit of conservatism if the change predicted by that best knowledge is too radical -- and expect that we'll have to change our approach in the future when more knowledge is available.

If what you want is final, unequivocal and never-changing answers, don't look to science. Science asymptotically approaches correctness. However, no other decisionmaking method we have guarantees even eventual correctness on any time scale.

Not true, for two reasons.

First, advertisers only pay if you click the on the ad. Advertisers can easily verify that the number of clicks Google claims corresponds to the number of hits their web site receives with a Google referral. There's some noise in that measurement, so the correlation isn't perfect, but it would be easy to see if it were systematically off.

Second, Google provides advertisers with extensive tools to help them determine how effective their ads are, or click "conversion rate", which boils down to revenue per click. Advertisers like Google because they can know exactly how effective their ad campaign is.

Note that I'm talking about Google's traditional method. In the last few years, Google has also acquired a (much smaller) business in "display" ads, in which Google gets paid per thousand ad "impressions". Even there, the advertiser can measure click-through effectiveness, though.

Google does not sell any data to the government, or to law enforcement agencies. Google complies with proper, legal requests for data, as specified by law, but does not get compensated for fulfilling those requests. Google is a publicly-traded company, which means they have to file extensive financial reports detailing their incomes and expenses so if I were wrong you could easily prove it.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google but I'm not speaking in an official capacity. My job at Google is writing code. But everything I've said here has been stated repeatedly in public by people who are official spokespeople. In particular with respect to the government request question, see David Drummond's many public statements.)

Actually, it's not. Certainly there are cases in which one can pay for speedier service, but those aren't all that common, particularly not in interactions with government. And where they do exist, they're open, published fees that are paid to the agency or company in question, not under-the-table bribes to an individual. Bribery does exist in America, but it's pretty rare, and trying to bribe a public official is a good way to go to jail.

The one major exception, of course, is campaign contributions. Though, theoretically, those can't be used to enrich the receiver.