Check Out the Badassest Baby Book Ever. Baby.

What Makes a Baby, by Cory Silverberg, is an introduction to human reproduction written and illustrated for kids as young as 4. The awesomeness: It doesn't assume that the reader is biologically related to his (exactly) two parents, both of whom are cisgendered and straight, and both of whom are married and monogamous. It explains the plain facts of the biology in a way children can understand, and it otherwise leaves the narrative of how the reader came to her current family for the family to tell. Check it out!

"When an egg and a sperm meet, they swirl together in a special kind of dance. As they dance, they talk to each other. The egg tells the sperm all the stories it has to tell about the body it came from."

You can order a hard copy through Amazon, or read the Kindle version right now, and the 60 page accompanying reader's guide for adults is available as a free PDF.

But instead of just buying it, what I really want you to do is make sure your local library orders it if it hasn't already!

Instability of Values Over Self Modification: Why Babies Creep Me Out

(Inspired by "Schelling fences and slippery slopes" by Yvain.)

Dear everyone who keeps human larvae as pets,

I am sincerely happy if you've found a way to satisfy your central values and if your children make you happy. Honestly, there are central terms for the preferences and happiness of others in my utility function. So please only read the following in light of that. I am not criticizing you for choosing to spawn, and, indeed, your kids are adorable and I like watching videos on Facebook of them playing with puppies and eating cake with their entire faces, so keep it up.

Here's what's bothering me. When I look at the walls of my friends with children, almost every post involves the kid. This is perfectly understandable. I also post almost exclusively about the things that interest me most (namely rationality, dance, and math), and of course your kid is the most important thing in the entire world. If I had a kid, I'd almost certainly think the same thing about it. I would love it more than I knew I could love, and everything else would be at least second place.

And I find that ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING. It means that there exists a parasite that can first implant itself in the lining of my uterus, with or without my consent, and use me as an incubator before torturing me for hours or days as it extricates itself from my body.

And that's not the scary part.

It can then begin to covertly re-write the foundations of my personality, undermining my adherence to beliefs about the significance of my own happiness, the happiness of my friends, self-optimization, world-optimization, and anything whatsoever not directly necessary for its own survival. In fact, it would make sure that I'd not even hesitate to die (or kill) protecting it, regardless of whether its continued existence would most likely help or hurt the other things I (used to) care about.

From my perspective, this strikes me as a completely insane thing to desire. It's like wanting to take a pill that won't satisfy your values, but will change your values such that current circumstances already satisfy them, never mind that it means replacing yourself with SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY.

How the hell do people just take that in stride???

The Powerful History of a Popular Hymn

You have definitely heard "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at some point. It's the one with the chorus that goes "Glory, glory, halleluiah, etc., His truth is marching on." I heard the melody at a swing dance last night, and as all three lyrics of the chorus that I knew were playing incessantly through my head on the way home, I started to wonder what the rest of them might be. When I finally looked them up, I was shocked by how strange, powerful, and violent the verses really are. "He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword" is not something I generally expect to hear in an apparently upbeat popular song.

Until today, there's been no better way to put me to sleep than to start talking about American Civil War history. Boy has this changed things! I now feel an overwhelming pride to be the same species as the creatures who took part in creating this song--mixed, of course, with crushing disappointment that my American history classes failed so spectacularly. In case yours did too, here's why The Battle Hymn of the Republic is awesome.

Julia Howe

Just before the cold dawn of a November morning in 1861, poet and activist Julia Howe awoke from a dream. Beating against the cage of her skull were lyrics begging to be committed to paper. Stumbling in the dark for the nearest pen, frantically she wrote. Her verses were first published in Atlantic Monthly in February of 1862, about a year after the beginning of the Civil War.

The day before that dawn, she'd attended a public review of troops just outside Washington, DC. While the soldiers were gathered, they began to sing. They sang these words, to the tune of a snippet from an old campfire spiritual called "Canaan's Happy Shore", and Howe listened to their song.

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
But his soul keeps marching on

Who is this John Brown, 

and what has he to do with the meaning of Howe's song?

Some consider Brown a terrorist, others a hero. To the troops through which first "John Brown's Body" and then "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" shot light lightning, clearly he was a martyr.

Five years earlier, during the Bleeding Kansas border war, Brown distinguished himself from other abolitionists by insisting that passive resistance to southern slavery advocates would do nothing but protect the complacency of free northerners. If the Good Guys are to win, he thought, they'll have to actually do something. And he knew that it would have to involve violence.

His biographers say he believed he'd been sent to visit God's justice upon slaveholders and those who supported them. Whatever his motivation, he caused people to ask themselves, "How much do I care about what I believe? What will I do if I'm called to act? Would I fight for freedom? Would I kill? Would I die?"

In 1859, under Brown's command, some proved that the answer was "yes". His very own army set out to raid a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Their objective: Arm the local slaves for insurection. The raid was unsuccessful, and Brown was captured by the forces of Robert E. Lee.

In the following months, it became apparent that many more really would fight for freedom with their own hands. A year after John Brown's death, the song of his vision coursing through the northern air, half of a country went to war to save four million people they'd never even met.

This is the story Julia Howe immortalized when she wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic".

Why is this my new favorite song?

Because it means that when it matters enough, when a strong enough leader arises, sometimes--not always, but sometimes--humans will abandon personal comfort to fight for a better world.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

Reflections On Reflection

Note: A shorter version of this post will appear at A Moment Of Science very soon. If you're interested in my extra sciencey stuff, that's where to watch.

Alice peers through the looking glass.

When I was a little baby freshman philosopher, one of my very first professors asked me this question: Why do mirrors flip images left and right, but not up and down? 

At first, I didn't understand what this had to do with philosophy (not that I knew what philosophy was--which was exactly his point!). It sounded like physics to me, and answering surely required knowledge of optics that I didn't possess.

Today, I consider the process of working out the answer to this question one of the very best illustrations of philosophical methodology I've ever seen. This an ode to figuring things out.

Understanding the Question

First, let's make sure we know what the problem is.

Imagine that you're you. (This is either very easy or very difficult, but I'm not sure which.) Or go find an actual glove and just be you. Either way. Now put a glove on your left hand, leave your right hand bare, and stand in front of a mirror. What do you see? You see an image that looks just like you, except she’s wearing a glove on her right hand while her left hand is bare.

This is what we mean when we say that mirrors seem to flip images left and right. But if they flip left and right, why don’t they reverse up and down as well? Why isn't your mirror image standing on her head? How does the mirror know which way is “up”?

Guess

Let's try making a few guesses. Guessing give us something to work with.

1. Maybe it has to do with binocular vision. You can draw an imaginary line from one eye to the other, and that line is horizontal. Could that be responsible for the strange asymmetry?
2. Or maybe the molecules in the mirror somehow constantly re-orient themselves according to the nearest large source of gravity. If your last chemistry or physics class was in high school, this is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. Maybe some feature of the molecular orientation causes the asymmetry. Mirrors would have to do it really quickly so that if you flip a mirror 180 degrees, the molecules will have already adjusted before you could see an upside-down image.
3. Or perhaps mirrors are made of thousands of long thin tiles laid side by side. Each one reflects light both up-down and left-right, but they’re so thin in the up-down flipping direction that the big combined reflection is only flipped left-right.

Check

We've got some guesses above, and we want to know if any of them is correct. Let's see how far we can get with just thinking before we have to turn the problem over to professional scientists.

1. Suppose it's true that mirrors do what they do because of binocular vision. What does that mean exactly? It means mirrors seem to know which way is "up" because our eyes are two points defining a line. A line can be an axis, and we think of this particular one as horizontal. If you have one axis, you can imagine another that's perpendicular to the first, and in this case we'd think of that one as vertical. Now we've got a reference frame for what is "left" vs. what is "up". The guess is that this reference frame determines our perception of our reflection in the mirror.
   
   What could we predict if we knew that were true? Well, we'd expect to be able to change what the mirror seems to count as "up" by changing the orientation of that horizontal axis defined by our eyes. So let's check.
   
   While standing in front of the mirror with the glove on your left hand, spread your arms and lean over so that your left hand is up in the air, your right hand is reaching toward the floor, and your head is tilted 90 degrees from to its usual position. What do you see?
   
   The mirror hasn’t fallen for your trick, has it? Your reflection is still wearing a glove on her right hand, which is reaching up--but her feet are exactly where they were before despite being to the “right” from the perspective of your head rather than “down”. So binocular vision can't be the answer.
2. Our second guess was that the molecules re-orient according to the location of the nearest large gravity well. This one's harder. To test this, it seems you’d either need a gravity well more massive than Earth (which I really hope you don’t have handy), or you’d need a rocket ship headed for the moon with a camera mounted on it filming a mirror as the Moon’s gravity took over. That’s not an impossible test, but it’s not a cheap one either. And it just doesn't quite feel right, does it? But that's not enough to dismiss the hypothesis.
   
   We've mostly escaped the realm of thought experiments at this point. But that doesn't mean it's time to stop thinking. Let’s assume, just for now, that this won’t give us the answer and try some other things first.
3. The third guess is that mirrors are made of zillions of long thin tiles. Each strip flips the image up/down as well as left/right, but they're so thin you don't see the up/down part. I'm pretty fuzzy on how zillions of thin tiles would end up making a single, cohesive, life-sized image. Perhaps that's a problem for another day. But let's take that for granted and see what happens.
   
   This is much easier to test. If the tile hypothesis is correct, you should be able to make an up-down flipping mirror by turning a left-right flipping mirror sideways. But that's not actually what happens, is it? So this can't be the answer either.

Time For a Closer Look

It’s looking even more now like the mirror somehow knows which way is “up”. As a general rule of problem solving, when you end up more sure that household items are conscious than you were when you began, it’s time to re-check your assumptions.

We assume two key things when we ask, “Why do mirrors flip images left and right, but not up and down?” First, we assume that mirrors flip images left and right. Second, we assume that mirrors don’t flip images up and down.

Let’s start with the second. What would it mean if you, out in the real world and not in mirror land, flipped yourself in the up/down direction? It would mean you were standing on your head. You’d have rotated yourself 180 degrees around the (horizontal) x axis. Mirror images don’t stand on their heads when we stand on our feet, so assumption two is correct. Mirrors really don’t flip images up and down.

But what would it mean if you flipped yourself left/right? If flipping up and down means rotating 180 degrees around the x axis, then flipping left and right must mean rotating 180 degrees around the (vertical) y axis. 

Rotating around the y axis is what we usually call “turning around”. Is that actually what mirrors do? Do they make turned-around pictures of us?

Imagine that you make a perfect, flesh-and-blood copy of yourself. She, too, is wearing a glove on her left hand. Place her in front of you so that you’re looking at her back. Now, while you stay perfectly still, rotate her 180 degrees around the y axis--that is, turn her around to face you.

Where is her glove? Why, it’s still on her left hand! To shake gloved hands, you’d have to reach across your body. If she were a mirror image, it would be on her right hand, not her left. So the first assumption must be wrong. Mirrors do not, in fact, flip images left-and-right.

So what’s really going on?

Mirrors don’t flip up and down, and it turns out that they don’t flip left and right either. But there’s some sort of flipping or reversing happening. Otherwise ambulances would just have “AMBULANCE” written on them instead of the odd backward version you can read normally in your rear-view mirror.

There’s only one obvious dimension left for flipping. If it’s not up and down, and it’s not left and right, then it must be back to front. But what would that mean?

Take off your glove, and hold it so the thumb is on your left and the palm is facing up. If you turn it upside down, the palm is facing down. If you turn it around from the starting position, the thumb is on your right.

Now, again from the starting position, turn the glove inside out without turning it in any other direction. The wrist part of the glove, which used to be closest to you, is now farthest away, while the the fingers are pointing toward you. It has not flipped upside down. It has not turned left or right. The glove has flipped front-to-back, and it now fits on your right hand instead of your left. 

If that’s what mirrors were doing, then what would you expect to see?

Suppose you’re looking at a mirror while facing North. The part of you that’s farthest South in reality, namely your bottom, would seem farthest North in the image--and, indeed, it does. The part that’s farthest North in reality, namely your nose, would seem farthest South in the image--and, indeed, it does.

You wouldn’t expect, however, to have to reach across your body to shake gloved hands, and you wouldn’t expect your image to do a headstand without your help.

That’s it, then! Mirrors don’t know which way is up after all. They just flip images front-to-back.

The Beauty Of Confusion

To review: 

• We asked a question. 
• We took some time to understand what was being asked. 
• We made a few guesses. 
• We tested them in our heads when we could, and pinned down how to go about testing them outside our heads when we couldn't. 
• When none of that gave us the answer, we doubled back to check our assumptions. 
• In the end, we solved the problem by dispelling a simple misunderstanding hidden in the question. 

Misunderstandings hide in questions all the time. If you're impatient and epistemically reckless, that's horribly frustrating, and it probably causes you to waste a lot of time trying to answer questions that don't make sense. This is much of why a healthy helping of philosophy is a tasty and nutritious side-dish even when science is your main course. If you're patient and rigorous, if you enjoy taking the time to simply think, you can learn all kinds of new things just by reflecting on them. 

Nifty, huh?

"Hang on a minute here, you're thinking. "At first we wanted to know why mirrors flip images left/right but not up/down. Turns out we were confused about that. But now I don't know why mirrors flip images front/back but not left/right or up/down!"

Impressive. Most impressive. But you are not a Jedi yet.

Learn More

• The law of reflection
• Why do mirrors seem to have depth?
• The Khan Academy series on waves and optics

Happy Mother's Day

A post in honor of Theresa Strohl, as kick-ass at motherhood as at everything else she does.

Children are tiny people. 

 

Ever since I began forming long-term memories, Mom's treated me like a person. Not a "child", not a "daughter" and not "mine". She never put me in an essentializing conceptual box with a label of any sort. She's always thought of me as a separate human being with my own values, talents, and ambitions.

I used to take this for granted, but then I met everyone else.

When you love someone and you have nearly complete power over them, I imagine it must be very difficult not to redirect them when they diverge from your personal model of what you'd like them to be. I think a lot of parents let their love for their children become oppressive; they're so afraid their child might get hurt, or acquire unforeseen values, or believe different things than they do, that they force them along a path they feel to be safe.

Mom gave me the room to weigh risks myself, and trusted me to discover successes she never could have provided on her own.

This has caused me to keep my identity (relatively) small. Curiosity, relinquishment, and most of the other virtues I care about are extremely difficult to practice when changing feels like killing off parts of yourself. Because Mom gave me freedom to become, I have felt not at all constrained to remain as I am. This freedom, combined with the urge to know for which Dad is largely responsible, has produced a willingness to surrender to the truth that has so far proven to be my most powerful skill as a rationalist.

I never came out.

Perhaps the most striking evidence that this method was effective is that I never came out as queer (or bi, or however I thought of it when I first realized I'm often attracted to people who aren't men). I think I wrote a blog post about it at some point in high school (back on Livejournal *cough*), but it was definitely an afterthought. Mom didn't essentialize my sexual orientation any more than she did any other part of my identity, so I had no reason to do so myself.

Let me be clear: I was raised in a tiny Midwestern town, in a Catholic parish no less. It really is extremely strange that my first thought upon discovering I was attracted to a female classmate was, "Maybe I should ask her out," rather than something along the lines of, "Oh god does this mean I'm GAY? What do I do? AM I GOING TO HELL? No one must know. What will I tell my parents? Will they still love me???" There was absolutely none of that. I was very surprised to discover other people react that way.

It just wasn't a thing for me.

We're totally bff's.

 

Our relationship has changed over the years as easily as I have changed myself. It does not fit in a box called "mother/daughter". Everything about our interactions means more to me because of that.

Mom's a good friend of mine these days. We have a lot in common, and we make each other happy. I learn from her, she learns from me, and we think of each other as peers with a lot of love and history between us.

When I'm making a difficult decision, I ask for her advice because I value her opinion, and I'm never worried that I'll let her down by not doing what she suggests. No topic is out of bounds; she tells me about cute boys she's dating, recounts Sunday homilies when they inspire her (though she knows I'm an atheist), and gets genuinely excited when I tell her about a cool book I'm reading, even if it's about number theory.

I look up to her because she is a wise and compassionate woman worthy of my admiration and gratitude. I honor her today because she is an exceptional human being. I am tremendously lucky that she also happens to be my mother.

A Parable on the Urge to Know

A couple of years ago, my boyfriend and I had both come down with bad colds. We went to the pharmacy, and he planned to grab some cold medicine while I picked up tissues and some other groceries. When he failed to meet me at the front after I was done, I went back to the aisle where I’d left him. He was staring at the wall of medicines looking perplexed and frustrated. “What’s taking so long?” I said.

“I don’t know how to choose!” he replied. There were dozens of options, and he couldn’t come up with a good way to evaluate them. He’d been stumped for fifteen minutes. He was experiencing choice paralysis. “There are a dozen different brands that all say they’re for stuffy noses, congestion, and coughing. How am I supposed to pick one?”

I picked up a few bottles to check out the active ingredients. “Anything with dextromethorphan, guicinophen, and phenylephrine will do,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because everything that says ‘congestion’ has guicinophen while nothing else does, everything that says ‘coughing’ has dextromethorphan while nothing else does, and everything that says ‘stuffy nose’ has phenylephrine while nothing else does. They even have the same doses of all of those. The ‘inactive ingredients’ vary, but it’s all stuff like corn syrup and flavoring. I want to pay for feeling healthy, not tasting bubblegum.” I tossed him the cheapest one with all three.

When we got home, I Googled each of those ingredients and discovered that I should have gone to the pharmacist and asked for something with ephedrine instead of phenylephrine, since ephedrine reliably outperforms placebos while phenylephrine doesn’t. We went back for it a bit later. Still, I was able to finally get us out of that damn pharmacy with effective medication and home to watch gargoyles and eat soup, because my first thought was “What actually works, and how can I know?” instead of the epistemically neutral “Which of these brands should I buy?” My urge to know the truth let me cut through the advertizing to successfully achieve my goals.

The elegant update I have in mind here is not “Check the active ingredients when choosing medications” (though that actually has frequent concrete advantages). The update is “When you’re faced with many options, ask yourself what your end goal is and how you would know which option is likely to bring you closer to achieving it.” My boyfriend tells me this is one of the greatest impacts I’ve had on his life over the four years we’ve known each other. It’s a tiny little habit I’ve always taken for granted because I was raised by scientists. But since this was news to him, it dramatically altered how he thought about making choices.

I ended up making an important update that day as well. I’m honored to be dating one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and I knew that early on. This brief interaction was the first time it really sunk in that there’s more to being rational than having an especially powerful brain--which meant that maybe I needed to search for better methods, too. Before, I’d thought I was pretty much stuck with whatever intelligence I’d been born with, plus or minus memorizing a lot of facts. But really, I had some major advantages over someone with more innate brain power, because I’d learned more powerful cognitive methodology. I’d been trained, to some extent, in epistemic rationality.

What if, I wondered, there is even more to learn?

Rationality Activism

Secular groups should devote more resources to rationality activism. If you know what I mean by "rationality activism" and agree that we should be focusing on it more, you can stop here. Otherwise, read on.

Activism?

People get a little jumpy sometimes when I mention "activism" in the context of the secular movement. It often brings to mind "evangelical atheists" and concerted efforts to undermine religion. That's a scary picture when we've made so much progress toward establishing inviting communities, engaging in productive dialogues with religious organizations, and improving the atheist image. But I think this comes from a misunderstanding about what a secular group is and could be.

There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding our relationship with religious people and organizations. Many individual members have at least an intuition that there's something genuinely harmful about religion (or particular kinds of religion), and that the world would be better off without it. I strongly sympathize. Many central features of most of the largest religions are frightening and dangerous. On the other hand, even if a secular group wanted to fight religion explicitly, the project would probably fail. It isn't a practical strategy. (I'll happily defend that for anyone who asks me to, but since my goal is to describe an alternative method that would sidestep this issue, I'm not going to use this space to re-hash that apparently endless "confrontation vs. accommodation" debate.) 

So a lot of groups make the primary focus community building; one thing atheists lack is a ready-made community center where they know they'll be welcomed and accepted. It's very important secular groups maintain that particular function, whatever else we do in addition. At the very least, a strong community is simply a prerequisite for a successful community-based activist project.

The mistake we frequently make is in thinking that we must either be anti-religious or avoid activism entirely. This is silly. There is a positive approach to activism that makes sense for us, and not only would taking it give us direction, but we're uniquely situated to make rapid and far-reaching improvements to the world should we unite toward this goal.

Religion is not the problem.

"Activism" is about passionate, coordinated efforts to change the world. What secular activism should be depends on what changes we want to make to the world. What are those changes? What counts as "winning" for the secular movement? I don't think "equal social status and protection under the laws for non-religious people" is the answer to that particular question, even if it's definitely a significant improvement to the current situation. (It is, of course, a mission particular organizations within the secular movement should be focusing on. I'm speaking more generally, and especially to student groups.) It's certainly a crucial step along the path, but our preoccupation with science, for example, is evidence that we already have our sights set higher than that.

If we really stop to think about it, I doubt "the end of religion" is the answer either. Imagine that, overnight, all organized religion disappears. Everything else remains the same, but nobody goes to church, nobody prays, and nobody believes in God. I'll definitely grant that this is a net improvement. Shall we call it a day and keep to ourselves from here on out, or is there more work to be done?

Before the advent of this anti-religious miracle, what bothered me about religion was a very simple matter: Many religious memes are powerful deterrents to rational decision making. They can act as parasites that latch onto our cognitive biases and drain away whatever potential we have to inoculate ourselves against them. My concern is not, at heart, with religion itself, but with its exacerbation of irrationality that comes pre-installed in human brains to start with. Self-reinforcing systematic irrationality causes incredible damage, and is plausibly responsible for all of the harm religion has ever done.

If it weren't for this particular feature, I wouldn't care much about religion, and I suspect most atheists (and anti-theists) wouldn't either. Religious people would simply be wrong, like someone who thinks the moon is made of cheese, and that would be that. 

This is why we secularists also spend our time educating people about homeopathy, chiropractic, and astrology when we get together in groups. We care about a deeper problem than religion.

We don't so much want the end of religion as the dawn of rationality.

Rationality Activism

Rationality activism means raising the sanity waterline. The notion of rationality I have in mind amounts to "systematic optimization from inside a human brain". I do not mean, for example, never relying on intuition to make decisions, ignoring emotion, or valuing only quantifiable things. I'm talking about the notion of rationality arising from cognitive science, not Hollywood. Rationality is the art of making decisions that are ever more effective at moving your life and the world toward your values. Note that if moving the world toward your values requires actually interacting with the world, it usually helps to have accurate beliefs about the world. When your map doesn't match the territory, it's a lot harder to get where you're trying to go. 

Rationality activism means working collaboratively at the grass-roots level to make ourselves, each other, and the world more rational.

Religion is not responsible for all of human irrationality. It preys on and exacerbates what irrationality already exists. With or without religion, we are predictably irrational. We make certain kinds of mistakes over and over again, simply because our brains must cut a lot of corners to navigate our fast-paced, complex environment. If everyone was expected, and given the tools, to patch these bugs in their cognitive programming, religion wouldn't stand a chance in the first place.

In a post to lesswrong.com, Eliezer Yudkowsky proposes a thought experiment along the following lines. Imagine you have the opportunity to teach everybody one general method of rationality that is directed at making people more effective human beings, and it can't target religion in particular. What might you do to raise the sanity waterline high enough that religion goes under?

Well, maybe there is no one particular method that could make that happen. But we are, at the very least, narrowing in on a group of habits of thought that make people better at thinking critically, testing hypotheses, and avoiding—or at least mitigating the damage caused by—the cognitive biases we were all born with. The world where everyone consistently practices these kinds of habits is the one I'm really after. The fact that it probably doesn't include religion is merely an added bonus.

So hey, we don't have to funnel all our passion, frustration, and other forces driving us to get out there and change the world for the better into banging on church doors hoping for deconversions. Neither do we have to settle for leveling the playing field so atheists are treated just as well--and just as poorly--as theists. We don't have to fight against religion, thereby letting it set the terms of our activism.

Instead, we can work together to fight for rationality.