Good Morning December 11, 2016

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Good morning on this the eleventh day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I had an interesting exchange with my four year old son today:

Child: I want my [specific toy].

Me: Where did you last have it?

Child: In my hand.

Me: That’s… true.

It’s always funny when children answer questions in a very literal way, and it gets to the heart of what I think is a common misunderstanding of children: the idea that children are irrational. (There is, I think, a true idea that children are irrational in the sense of what changes at the age of reason, which is to say, when they seem to gain the ability to reason in an abstract manner, but that’s not what I mean and isn’t, generally, what people mean either.)

In particular, children aren’t nearly so much irrational as inexperienced. In a theoretical sense, knowledge and what you do with it are two separate things. This is related to the distinction of knowledge coming from experience and wisdom from learning the right lessons from that experience. Children take questions—like my question above—literally not because they can’t conceive of any wider meaning, but because they have no experience which suggests any wider meaning. Most of the things we say in life we mean very literally. “Don’t draw on the table with that crayon” does not have an esoteric meaning. “Do you need to use the potty” does not allude to any large topic with complex considerations. “Do you want a PB&J or Grilled Cheese?” touches on no subtleties. But when I ask my child where he had his toy last, this does bring up some of the complexities of looking for lost items; or at least it is meant to. But the child can only know that by this question being a prelude to trying to conjure in his imagination where the object was.

And as an incidental detail of child raising, it turns out that doing this is in fact a learned skill. I can remember with my oldest child helping him to find things several times by doing the very simple, “where were you when you last had it” and then going and looking there. They learn that skill very quickly, though, since it’s so effective, and it only take a few repetitions before they go look on their own and only ask for help when it’s not where they remember playing with it last.

There’s another interaction I can recall, which shows a similar pattern:

Me: Stop hitting your brother with Optimus Prime!

Child: Puts down optimus prime, picks up Bumblebee, starts hitting brother with Bumblebee.

The child wasn’t trying to get by on a technicality. In the first few months of hitting one’s brother, there are a lot of complex lessons to learn, such as that the objection to optimus prime (which I didn’t explicitly state) is not some special thing about Optimus Prime which I know and the child didn’t and so he just had to trust me, but that Optimus Prime was made of hard plastic, which the child can know himself, and consequently that this same objection holds to Bumblebee, who is also made of hard plastic. By contrast, when the children are hitting each other with balloons, I don’t object, because the balloons are soft and have little mass and can’t hurt anyone. But it takes a lot of data for the child to figure out what’s common to the few things he and his brother may hit each other with and what’s common to the many things he may not. He’s not trying to see what he can get away with, but just utterly lacking the experience of adults in knowing what actually hurts people.

And part of how you know that he lacks this experience is that he makes the exact same mistakes when applied to himself. He does things which hurt himself and is surprised at the result. For example, it seems that children will not believe you about not snapping rubber bands on themselves until they’ve done it hard enough to cry at it. They’re not attempting to lawyer their way through technicalities, but to navigate a big and complex world with a great many twists and turns in it without any data.

This same problem does affect adults interacting with each other, by the way. Except that while with children we expect them to not know what we know—at least somewhat expect it, anyway—it’s all too common for adults to assume that all other adults know what they know, and furthermore to hold it to be a failing if the other adult doesn’t know it. This results in a great deal of miscommunication, since on any complex subject we only say a small fraction of what we mean (for efficiency’s sake) and require the listener to interpret most of our meaning based on shared knowledge and context. Especially on the internet, which throws together people with vastly differing backgrounds, it’s a very good idea to make sure of what someone’s unstated context really is before you assume you know what they mean. Don’t go full Wittgenstein—never go full Wittgenstein—but it is true that a great many philosophical and political disagreements turn out to be misunderstandings. There are enough real disagreements in the world; it’s unhelpful to shrowd them in a haze of miscommunication.

God bless you.

Good Morning December 10th, 2016

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Good morning on this the tenth day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

Winter is clearly here in force now. I was waiting for my oldest son at the bus stop and felt like I was slowly turning into an icicle. And I deal better with cold than with heat. There’s something fascinating about the cycle of how in northern climes the world dies off then comes back to life again. It’s an interesting metaphor, anyway. It also raises a curious question about fiction set in lands that are in permanent snow: what’s the basis of life there? It various with the fictional environment, of course, but perhaps the ones I find most interesting are the ones where there are warm lands nearby, so the basis of life is something like fish which wander into the colds to birth their young where there are fewer predators. It can make for some very pretty images.

As I’m working on the video response to my friend’s nephew which I mentioned before, I did a quick video which is just a short description of how to use a neodymium magnet as a stud finder, in place of an electronic stud finder or knocking with one’s finger and judging how hollow the sound is. The video wasn’t great but came out alright. As the British would say, it’s fit for purpose. But there’s one mistake in it where I want to put a text overlay and for some reason the video editor just isn’t playing sound. I’m sure I’ll fix it eventually, but it’s a reminder of the continual frustration of using technology. None of it works very well. Chesterton complained about this in What’s Wrong With the World:

Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one speciality; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing; made to supply many different needs; and while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins. The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which the strangest modern views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man’s house and that hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.

Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man will wave a cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil with a little screwing pencil-sharpener instead of a knife; and he will even boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have my doubts about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils; and about hot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those other requirements that these institutions answered, there opens before us the whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision a world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener; where a man must learn single-stick with a cigarette; where a man must try to toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the surface of hot water pipes.

This is not precisely the complain that modern technology doesn’t work, but it’s tied to it, for modern technology being more complicated, it is more prone to failure. And nowhere is this more true than in computers, which in general barely work. (I say this as a professional programmer.) But even when they barely work, they are marvelous things, allowing us to do all sorts of marvelous things like write and read blog posts. And whenever these things which barely worked in the first place do fail, we get very frustrated by it. Which is natural enough; but I try to remind myself of how close all modern technology comes to not working, and to remember that even if computers and phones and such work 99% of the time, it is still when they work that is the exception, not when they fail. For all their success is snatched from failure. It is really a miracle that they work at all. It’s not accurate to the small picture, exactly, but it is accurate to the big picture. We live in an enchanted world, and it’s healthy to remember all he millions of men who have lived and died without ever having placed a single telephone call, or whose computer never booted up at all because it would be several centuries until the invention of electricity on demand.

God bless you.

Good Morning December 9th, 2016

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Good morning on this the ninth day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

Something I was randomly thinking about recently was Tom Naughton’s rather good talk Science for Smart People:

If you haven’t seen it, it’s very much worth watching. Tom Naughton is always enjoyable to watch and he presents good advice on how to deal with the popular reporting of science (specifically about diet and nutrition).

I got some more comments on my video Atheism vs Meaning, which amount to, “I can do whatever I want, so I can decide my life has meaning”. Yeah, if you can do that and all choices are equally valid, your life doesn’t have any meaning. And in any event, if he’s right, I can choose that the meaning I give to life is that his meanings are meaningless. It does get frustrating, some times, getting comments from people who are angry at me because they’re incapable of thinking clearly.

There’s a tiny amount of snow on the ground outside, so I suppose that means it really is winter. The bitter cold was another clue, of course, as was the date, but it can be a bit hard to accept that winter has really arrived. I’m not sure why, since I do like winter. It’s a very poignant season, often beautiful but with a harsh beauty. On the other hand all of the disease-carrying insects are dead or dormant, so I think we an overrate its harshness a bit.

God bless you.

Good Morning December 8th, 2016

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Good morning on this the eight day in December, in the year of our Lord 2016.

It is also the feast of the Immaculate Conception, on the Roman Catholic calendar. The doctrine of the immaculate conception is a very interesting one; in brief it is that the salvation of Christ was applied to Mary at the moment of her conception so that she would have the ability to become the mother of God, and relatedly so that she could make with perfect freedom the biggest choice anyone in the whole history of the human race has ever made. For various practical reasons we tend to focus on the freedom to say “no” to options, but sin weakens people and is perhaps clearest in addicts that freedom also requires the freedom to say “yes” to things. I won’t dwell on the doctrine since I know so little about it, but it does certainly raise some interesting questions.

In other news I posted a second hangout on my youtube channel:

This time I had the pleasure of talking with The Distributist. As conversations are wont to do, it wandered over a variety of subjects, but it started and to some degree ended by discussing classical liberalism (the liberalism of the post-reformation and enlightenment era). It was a little more structured than my hangout with Deflating Atheism, but not tremendously so. I’m still very undecided about whether a conversation or an interview is a better format. And of course, “neither, do both” is always a possible conclusion.

I also noticed that Hoyt and Bowtech have announced their new bows this year. (In general new bows tend to be announced at the end of archery season, it seems.) In general there doesn’t seem to be much difference; I think Bowtech characterized this as, “this year is about refinement”. And once again the only fast 80# or greater bow seems to be the Matthews Monster Safari, which costs $2,100. I did get the opportunity to shoot once once (rare, since they are all custom made and no one stocks them) and it was an amazing bow. It had a very, very smooth draw cycle and just felt amazing to draw and shoot. It costs so much money because they really went all out with hard-to-make parts that were optimal for the workload, and it shows. If you can afford it—and so far I can’t—you’re paying for performance, not for looks or a nameplate (though I do think it looks nice enough).

So I’ve basically concluded that if I want something to shoot my 0.175″ deflection arrows (which are as stiff as you can get in factory made arrows) with more than 102 ft-lbs of kinetic energy, my best bet is to keep working on my carbon fiber longbows. Right now I’m using wooden limbs with carbon fiber backing, which seems to be easy to do up to round 40#, just guestimating. When one pushes above that, limb design becomes more critical, and so far I think I’ve been too aggressive in tapering the limbs, which puts too much bend in them towards the tips. An all-composite material could probably handle that much bending, but wood doesn’t like to be bent that much. Accordingly it works better to concentrate the bending loser to the handle, where less bending is required for the same draw distance. The bow I’m working on now (well, to be fair, it’s laid aside for the moment in the middle of being made) is promising, but I had an initial glue failure in the limb where it delaminated because I didn’t have a good bond between the ipe belly layer and the walnut core. Basically, I forgot to rough it up before gluing. So I’ve done a good job of that and just need to re-glue them up, but gluing with epoxy is always something of a production and I just haven’t had the time and energy to set it up. Also since there are minimum batches of epoxy (to make mix ratios easy to attain accurately), I always feel bad about small projects which therefore involve a fair amount of waste. At the same time I really should look for a different epoxy for doing wood laminations, since the concerns for gluing wood together are not the same as for setting up composites like carbon fiber. It’s possible there’s a more ideal epoxy for the wood layers. (If it isn’t clear why the limb delaminated, the inside of a curve is shorter than the outside of a curve, and so when the limb bends the belly really wants to push out further than the core (and the core further than the back), which introduces sheer strain on the laminations. Thus the most important characteristic in the glue for the laminations is its sheer strength.)

May God bless you.

Good Morning December 7th, 2016

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Good morning on this the seventh day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I was joking last night with someone who doesn’t have children yet but wants to that the myth that children sleep is a lie spread by the pajama industry. Obviously this isn’t literally true—at a minimum the bedding industry must be involved too. But it does remind me of a great quote from Chesterton about how common the experience of human life is, especially at its most core elements:

For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man’s life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won’t, to the end of the last evening.

I do not know from personal experience whether birds actually will go to their beds, but I can testify that children certainly won’t.

It is an amazing privilege to bring children into the world and care for them and teach them what it is to be human. It is also a great deal of work. Most good things are.

God bless you.

Good Morning on December 6th, 2016

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Good morning on this the sixth day of December, in the year of our Lord 2016.

So I did my first hangout with another youtuber today. (Properly I published it today, it happened earlier.) It was definitely an interesting experience. I talked too much, I think, and the conversation was not very focused. I don’t think that’s a problem in itself, but it did result in my saying “um” and pausing more than I’d have liked because I was evaluating possible things to say and trying to decide whether they were too far afield. (There’s also just the issue of being chronically underslept from little children.) Deflating Atheism was great to talk with, though again I feel like I sometimes gave him unfocused questions or just didn’t give him much to work with. Still, I think it will be enjoyable enough to listen to—deflating atheism’s parts, anyway—and it’s certainly a learning experience for future hangouts, both with Deflating Atheism and others. Everything in this world has a learning curve. Even small changes to things one is familiar with have a learning curve. It’s a good reason not to judge a book by its first page, nor a TV show by its first episode, nor a person by the first words out of their mouth. Conversely, it’s also why it’s a great idea to not over-commit to the first one of something that you do. In programming this has a maxim: plan to throw out the first implementation; you will anyway.

In less interesting news, I got to the gym again last night, which is a good step in rebuilding the habit of going to the gym regularly. And in a very small personal triumph, I managed to use the same absurdly light weights I did last time I went.  I figure in another two weeks, I can start adding in a little more weight, and in 2-4 months, depending on how I feel, I can finally start lifting genuinely challenging amounts of weight. But I’ll get there much faster if I don’t have to rest up any injuries. 🙂

God bless you.

Good Morning December 5th, 2016

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Good morning on this the fifth day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

Yesterday my oldest son, who is seven years old, was asking me about the Hobbit, and whether we could go to the library and get it. I said that wouldn’t be necessary, since I have a copy of it, but last night when he asked me to get it, I couldn’t find it. My wife, who was helping me to look, did notice that I had a copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and suggested that my son might enjoy that too. Whereupon I launched into an enthusiastic sales pitch because I really love the Chronicles of Narnia. (If I recall correctly, I own about 2 shelf-feet of books by C.S. Lewis.) At some point during my sales pitch my son politely interrupted me and said he was interested and could we start reading it tonight? If there’s one thing I’ve learned about sales (and there may in fact be only one thing I’ve learned about sales), it’s that you should never sell past the close, so I said yes.

He got to sleep a bit late, unfortunately, but we ended up reading the first three chapters, and it’s as good as I remember it. It’s also, aside from the occasional british-ism, very accessible to young children. I myself read it when I was a teenager, but it works at an age where children can read but still like to have things read to them.

In other news, I finished the first draft of my response to my friend’s nephew, so I should be editing the script today and if I’m lucky recording tomorrow. Overall I think it came out decently, though it is a bit scattershot. That’s part of the problem  with a question whose problem is a collection of errors embedded into the ground presuppositions of modernity. Like fabric, the errors that people make tend to be woven out of several threads spun by people who came before them. Ideally, I suppose, I’d address each point in its own video, but it can be very valuable to actually show in a practical way where such errors lead one wrong, and in any event the task at hand is answering this question, so it will probably do more good to do the task I’ve been given than to try to invent a different one for myself and ignore this one while I work on it. That’s not always true, of course; sometimes it’s better to start laying a foundation for what you’re going to do before you do it even if you’re under time pressure. But as I was recently reminded, that doesn’t really apply to videos, because you can’t assume people will have watched your other videos anyway.

God bless you.

Good Morning December 4th, 2016

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Good morning on this the fourth day of December, in the year of our Lord 2016.

So I finally opened up libreoffice to finish doing the formatting work on The Dean Died Over Winter Break. For those who don’t know, that’s my first mystery novel, the other two novels I (self) published having been broadly in the science fiction genre. I’m very fond of mystery, so I’m looking forward to it. The book is finished and edited, all that remains is to format it for publication. It’s been that way for quite some time, actually, so I feel guilty for having dragged my feet so much.

In part it’s just being busy—having a one-year-old in the house does take up quite a large amount of time, especially when there are older children around too. She’s finally starting to be able to play by herself a bit—and hold her own with her older brothers—so supervising her will become a lot less intensive as the months go by.

Another part of it is that around the time I was finished with writing the novel, I began to be active on social media. From what I gather this is critical for self-published authors (and most other-published authors as well) who want their books to get read. Granted for most this is a direct financial consideration, while for me it’s more just about finding readers. My plan is to continue working my day job at a minimum until my kids are safely on their own, and then we’ll see, so I’m working on what I call my “twenty year plan”. It takes time to build an audience. And so far my most successful social media platform is my youtube channel, having recently hit 125 subscribers. Now of course social media is not merely about trying to build up readers—to be blunt, that’s not a primary consideration—but that is a potential benefit of it, and so watching my youtube subscriber base go up has made it very tempting to hold off on publishing the novel for a bit in the hopes that it might get a bump from that. And the way that sales ranks affect Amazon’s recommendations leads to a probably unhealthy concern with getting initially decent sales in order to try to reach a wider audience.

At the same time, one of the key ingredients in getting things done is actually doing them, and it’s all to easy to wait forever for ideal circumstances, which will in any event never come in this life. And someone who enjoyed A Stitch in Space reminded me recently that I said I’d get the new novel out soon, so I’m going to finally make myself do it. In the end we never really know what we’re doing and have to trust God anyway.

Good Morning December 3rd, 2016

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Good morning on this the third day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend about the bayesian interpretation of statistics. I was doing a little research for a video which I’m working on (answering a question from a friend) and what I studied in math was what would often be described as the frequentist interpretation. I’m still a little skeptical of the bayesian interpretation, but much less so as I learn that it’s an interpretation of statistics which completely punts the assigning of probabilities. It calls them “priors”, as in “prior assumptions”, and says nothing about how we arrive at them. Basically, it turns statistics from a math problem that doesn’t apply to the real world (frequentism) into a quantification of our ignorance. Perhaps the clearest example of this is using bayesian statistics to gauge how surprised we should be by an outcome; surprise being, in this case, a measure of how much work we should put into re-examining our priors.

This is a far more reasonable thing than the descriptions of bayesian statistics I had heard before. I should note that those sources were not reliable ones, so I did hold off on judgment. And I think the problem with them was common to how people use classical mathematical probability: they want it to be a way of turning ignorance into knowledge. The desiderata is: garbage in, gold out. Which is to say, what is desired is alchemy for data. The ability to get a lot for little work. And that desire is a perennial temptation.

In other news, I’ve been working through the Vulkan tutorial. I’m still a ways away from being able to display anything on the screen, but I’m up to the point where I’ve found an available graphics card and a suitable queue family from which to request a queue to use for submitting commands. Having already read through the tutorial once, Vulkan is very verbose to set up—the tutorial took abut 800 lines of C++ to get a single, motionless triangle onto the screen—but a lot of that involves making decisions appropriate to your project, which you encapsulate into functions which are much easier to work with, so once you’ve done all this setup work, actually using it for the main graphics work is not significantly harder than other easier, less verbose APIs like openGL. And I do like the approach of having skimmed the tutorial first, then going back and doing it slowly to learn how things go. (And since I’m using the lwjgl (Light Weight Java Gaming Library), there’s a bit of translation work from the C++ of the tutorial to how lwjgl does things.) Fun stuff.

And it’s been a long time since I’ve done any bowmaking, but my problem is that since my third child was born it’s very hard to get an hour or two to myself when it’s OK to make baby-waking levels of noise. When she’s a bit older, I’ll get back to it.

One thing I’ve learned over many years of having a large number of hobbies, is that it’s important to be OK with putting some things on hold for a few years. It’s probably going to be four or five years until I take up knitting again, which I haven’t done much of in the last five years. And that’s OK.

Good Morning December 2nd, 2016

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Good morning on this the second day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

I’m not doing as good a job getting this written early in the morning as I had started out, but since the title sort of forms a theme, I’m going to stick with it for now in the hope that it will encourage me to get things done in the morning. At least they’re still getting done. 🙂

I went to the gym last night in the first time in a long time. Really since around the time my wife was pregnant with my third child. The gym has a room where they watch kids while the parents exercise, which we’d taken advantage of before, but that started to involve too much negotiation. We’ll see how that goes, but I’m hoping to take advantage of it to buy the time to actually get to the gym. I’m significantly closer to 40 than I am to 30, so I’m entering the age where I simply can’t afford to not work out. Especially given that I have a desk job by which I earn my livelihood. (I’m a programmer if I haven’t mentioned that before.) My preferred form of exercise is lifting weights, and it’s absurdly tempting to lift at close to what I had been lifting before (which was never all that high; two years ago I could do perhaps 4 reps of dumbbell presses (bench press but with dumbbells) with the 120lbs dumbells, and clean-and-press about 135lbs). But that’s a terrible idea. Even if I can lift close to it, the risk of injury is pretty high. So I’m stuck doing tiny amounts of weight for a few weeks at least. And I’m using the machines rather than the free weights to really play it safe. But if I do a good job playing it safe, at least I’ll be back to lifting real amounts of weight in a few months. It takes a long time to recover from injuries.

In other news, I got a comment on my review of the song Can’t Feel My Face:

The commenter was saying that the song wasn’t about addiction to romance or sex, but to cocaine. The “she” in the song is cocaine, personified. And googling around a little, he’s not the only one to take that interpretation. And a point in his favor, cocaine is a topical anaesthetic. It’s related to novocaine, lidocaine, and benzocaine and in fact there is medical cocaine which is used to numb areas prior to some types of surgery. It’s not as common as the others, but it’s a powerful vasoconstrictor and so there are applications where that helps. Anyway, this does suggest an explanation for the otherwise very strange metaphor “I can’t feel my face”. Since cocaine is usually snorted, it would make sense that it numbs at least the nose and possibly a wider area of the face. I will note that if the lyrics are personifying cocaine, they’re not well written, as they suggest the cocaine gets numb, whereas the cocaine doesn’t change. (That’s very artistically significant when personifying objects; how little they are is one of the most powerful things brought across in such a personification.) Anyway, I did cover the addiction interpretation of this song in my review, though I took it as romantic/sexual addiction, not cocaine (the cocaine angle hadn’t occurred to me, since the lyrics didn’t suggest it and never having used cocaine facial numbness isn’t instantly connected with cocaine in my mind). But I didn’t spend much time on this because addiction is boring. Addiction is most interesting to aspiring addicts; to almost everyone else it’s just about the most boring thing there is.

(By “aspiring addicts” I mean the people who are flirting with addiction. In the Catholic baptismal vows there’s a line, “Do you reject Satan? And all his works? And all his empty promises?” People flirting with addiction are in the position of hearing the empty promises but not really progressing onto the works part, where they find out that the promises are empty. So they’re full of hope because they’re tantalized by the promises they don’t realize are empty. And empty promises can promise so much! If you don’t plan to deliver on your promises, you might as well make very grandiose promises, after all.)

I don’t mean to keep ending on downers. If you’ve got a mathematical background, perhaps you’ll enjoy Klein Four’s Finite Simple Group of Order Two:

Or, more accessible, is this I Will Derive video that youtube recommended to me after I re-watched Finite Simple Group of Order Two:

Good Morning December 1st, 2016

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Good morning on this the first day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

So once again I’m contemplating the fact that there are many dumb atheists on Twitter who are good neither at thinking nor at reading. It’s frustrating, of course, but that’s really not very important in the grand scheme of things. More important is that it is a real temptation to over-generalize. Twitter’s extremely short character limits require a fair amount of imagination, background knowledge, and good judgment in order to understand non-trivial things which are said; of those who do not understand well some just move on and some ask for clarification, but there is a self-selection in favor of people with at least some wits and wisdom keeping their mouth shut unless they have something of value to say. Twitter, therefore, selects for a great many replies (to non-trivial tweets) being very dumb, since their lack of wits and wisdom make them think they have something to say when they didn’t even understand what they’re replying to.

But any time one has a self-selection bias, it becomes a great temptation to incorrectly generalize. And there are few ways to lose credibility faster than incorrect generalizations. Of course errors tend to compound, too, so not only will one lose credibility; believing in false generalizations will mean that before long, one won’t deserve credibility either.

For the moment my strategy is to mute people on twitter liberally. It’s not optimal; all people have value, though not everything everyone says has value, but I think what most of these people need is a friend to talk with them in depth over the course of several decades. That I certainly can’t be to random people on Twitter, so I think that simply ignoring them is the best compromise in order to avoid the temptations which the spewers of idiocy pose.

On a happier note, I tried out teledoc for my reinfection of strep, and it worked really well. The first time, a few weeks ago, I went to the local urgent care facility, which wasn’t too bad. Better than a hospital and about equal with a doctor’s office, though with less annoying paperwork. Still, one has to sit around and it’s not the cheapest thing in the world, if not overly expensive. At least under my insurance, Teledoc costs $40 per consultation, and after I signed up and filled out a short medical history questionnaire, I requested a consultation by phone and a doctor (located in my state, so they say) called me within five minutes. I described the history and symptoms in two minutes, she sent a prescription for amoxicillin over to my pharmacy one minute later, and after answering my question about the relationship of amoxicillin to penicillin (they’re the same class of drug, but are not at all the same drug, like how some drugs are metabolic precursors of the same thing, i.e. they become the identical drug once they get into your bloodstream), I was done. For the sort of illness which can plausibly be diagnosed over the phone, this is a really great option, and I’d certainly prefer this over going to a physical doctor’s office. Nothing in this world comes without tradeoffs, but at least for common stuff this seems like a real improvement.

Good Morning November 30th, 2016

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Good morning on this the thirtieth day of November, in the year of our Lord 2016.

So I came across a decent example of how internet atheists seem to be astonishingly ignorant. My friend Eve Keneinan posted this:

Which then resulted in some atheist coming in and saying this:

There are several things to unpack here, the first of which is the assertion that one can believe anything one wants without needing any reason for it. While technically true, this is just unrelated to real human beings, who in the push-and-pull of real life with other people who demand reasons if you want them to cooperate with you need to have either reasons or superior force. And if you’re getting your way by superior force, it will not be in a middle ground between individualism and collectivism. This is an appalling ignorance of how human beings actually work. It is technically true that you can hold the principle, “everyone should have exactly three teaspoons per day of icecream, no more and no less” without any sort of justification for it. But the moment you try to actually make people conform to your idea—or even just live by it yourself—you will rapidly find people demanding a good reason why they should be thus limited or compelled (depending on how much they feel like eating icecream) and in short order you’ll find them doing whatever they feel like. Yourself very much included, as people on diets so often find to their chagrin.

And if the atheist in question is trying to claim that people just naturally feel like running governments in a balance between extreme individualism and extreme collectivism, this is purely delusional. Just try to find someplace without people who don’t care what others want, they just want the government to impose stability. And just try to find someplace without people who don’t care what the rules are, they just want to do what they want to do.

Yet again we come across someone who looks around at what people largely raised in a religious setting tend to do as adults, without ever realizing that people tend to behave as they were raised, but don’t tend to raise their own children as they were raised if they differ in dogma from their own parents. And people really under-estimate just how powerful the impulse to be selfish is in children. Let’s just say it takes way more effort to produce, “OK, you can have it” than it does, “I want it.”

And then there’s “regression to the mean applies.” Pro tip: if you’re going to use technical terms, first learn what they mean. Regression to the mean is a biological concept, not a behavioral concept. It refers to things like height and intelligence and speed. A tendency among living things is for the offspring of extreme individuals to tend closer to the mean. This is because the genetic and environmental factors which lined up by chance to produce an extreme phenotype probably won’t randomly line up as well in the extreme individual’s offspring. You can kind-of-sort-of extend this concept to behavior, but behavior is often too complex to even define a “mean behavior”. More importantly, this means “mean” in the sense of, “mean of the population”, not “mean of the trait”. Thus while you might occasionally get unusually large elephants or unusually small elephants, their children will tend to be more average-sized for an elephant. It does not mean that elephants in general are trending towards a not-too-big-not-too-small size for an animal, so elephants are getting smaller while mice are getting bigger.

Secondly (or is this thirdly?) regression to the mean is in all cases only a heuristic. It is literally the opposite of evolution, where changes accumulate and children are more extreme than their parents until one eventually gets an entirely new species. (And there’s also just random mutation where maybe your child just has a membrane between its fingers and you didn’t.) Regression to the mean only applies to cases where there is some complex set of coincidences required to achieve an extreme effect and there is no selective pressure favoring the extreme effect.

Then of course the final three tweets mostly just demonstrate some combination of an inability to read and an inability to think. What kicked this off was stating that absent a force which pushes people to a mean between individualism and collectivism, they will naturally gravitate toward the extremes, which extreme depending on a personality trait which I specified. His last three tweets only state that if people naturally gravitated toward the middle, then that’s where they’d tend to end up. No kidding. The entire point of what I said was: that’s not what people gravitate towards. People gravitate towards license or protection, i.e. individualism or collectivism, depending on whether their ambition or their fears are stronger. Balancing the two requires something capable of saying yes to ambition some of the time and no to it other times; yes to fears some times and no to fears sometimes. Only dogmas can say to inclinations, “this far and no farther, here your proud waves shall break”.

There is of course a selective pressure involved. Dimwits who don’t know what they or anyone else are talking about have an easier time writing because there’s no requirement for it to be related to a complex environment (human beings, biology, what was said, etc). So it’s a mistake to draw from the multitude of insipidly ignorant, thoughtless atheists one encounters on the internet that all atheists are insipidly ignorant and thoughtless. And especially not that insipid ignorance is limited to atheists. It certainly isn’t, but in organized religions there is a check on ignorance which helps keep it from becoming insipid, specifically the organization where people who don’t know recognize that there are people who do, and will defer to them. Humble ignorance is a very different thing from arrogant ignorance; it is only the latter which is insipid. Since atheists have no organization (unless, I suppose, one is in a cult like Richard Dawkins’ cult), they tend to be left on their own. They can of course cultivate humility, but if they do it is all on them to do so, as there is no structure given to them which will tend to inculcate humility. (This is of course a thing railed against by ignorant fools, “religion teaches you to not think for yourself!” they cry, as if somehow thinking badly for yourself is superior to deferring to others. Most of the time this is probably not even sincere; it’s usually of the implicit form, “don’t let someone else tell you what to think, let me tell you what to think”.)

Good Morning November 29th, 2016

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Good morning on this the twenty ninth day of November, in the year of our Lord 2016.

So I’m actually writing this on my lunch break rather than first thing in the morning, but better late than never. I’ve been toying around with the idea of also recording these blog posts and turning them into a podcast. It seems that in the modern world, or at least in modern America, people who read things that are written are somewhat dividing up into two groups: those who read written words, and those who “read” them in audio formats. Especially significant in the latter, I believe, are all of the people who are cursed with a commute to work. Then having taken in a fair amount of writing, and having relatively little time outside of work after the time for their commute has been subtracted, they don’t have much time to read with their eyes. As such, this makes for in a sense two audiences, so that making recordings of the written word would mostly reach people who wouldn’t find it otherwise, rather than being redundant.

These daily posts are fairly short, so it wouldn’t take all that long to read them and then edit out any coughs, and I looked into it and wordpress supports the way itunes reads podcasts, since basically a podcast is just an RSS feed to a page with embedded audio. So I might give it a try. On the other hand, I need another time commitment like I need a hole in the head, as my grandmother used to say. It’s an idea, anyway, and it’s encouraging that I’ve gotten the feedback that people like my voice—generally people say it’s calming—though of course that’s self-selected feedback. (Who would listen to my videos if they hated my voice?)

Changing subjects, I’ve been thinking about The Order of the Wilds again. I’m coming to really like the basic idea—an rpg-minecraft hybrid game about warrior/mage who ventures out into the wilds to make them safe—and I think it could be extended in various ways to give it a lot of replay value. It would be fairly easy to add side-quests and alternate types of games. For example, there could be small settlements on the edges of the wilds, hermits, ancient ruins, etc. That could be a nice direction for expansion if the game gets at all popular (we’re talking about a release date like 3-10 years in the future). And the core game, of taming the wilds, has a lot of replay value in itself, I think, as long as the cities actually populate and are interesting to interact with. That’s more work than pure terrain would be, of course, but I think it can be done without requiring a team of 100 people. A big part of indie game developing is knowing your limitations and having a sense of what can be done on the cheap and what needs paid professionals (and then finding the intersection of those things and what would be fun to do).

I’ve also finished my first quick read-through of the Vulkan tutorial, and it confirms my initial suspicion. Vulkan is very verbose, because it is explicit about everything it does, but on the other hand a great deal of the setup work turns into functions you write that handles being explicit in the particular way you want to be, then you just use those and Vulkan becomes as easy to use as openGL or DirectX, but it’s faster (in some cases) and works better (in theory). So I think that soon I’m going to actually sit down and start really going through the tutorial with my editor open this time, actually writing code along with the tutorial.

I’m also working on a response to a question I got from a friend’s nephew about religion and probability. As so often happens it’s very easy to ask in a few words a question which can only be answered in many paragraphs. The basic question is about how it seems unlikely for anyone to actually correctly describe reality, though it’s put in probabilistic terms. In some very loose sense it’s a more intelligent variant of the popular meme, “there are 5000 gods but only yours is right”. The thing is, I need to address it from several angles simultaneously: on the one hand it presupposes knowledge is constructed, in the kantian fashion. On the other hand it also seems to presuppose that revelation isn’t true, because otherwise what human beings can get right isn’t very relevant if God simply told us what’s true. What a man can lift on his own is irrelevant if you know someone strong is helping him to do the lifting. There’s also simply the misunderstanding of probability, which says nothing about one-off events, though that’s comparatively minor to the other two. I suspect that my primary thrust will be about how things cannot be legitimately evaluated for truth on the assumption that they’re false. Even that’s a big subject, so I suspect it’s going to take me a while to formulate my response (especially since I’m going to try to keep it relatively brief).

Good Morning November 28, 2016

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Good morning on this the twenty eighth day of November, in the year of our Lord 2016.

I’m very unclear on why the schools and childcare facilities have off today, but it means a long day of trading off who’s watching the kids so that both my wife and I can get our work done. On the plus side, it also means trading off playing with the children, which is much more fun, at least when no one is screaming in anguish that some trivial thing went wrong. When it comes to children I don’t mind the drudgery of cooking food and doing dishes and laundry and cleaning excretory organs and such, but people’s displayed emotions tend to influence me a lot, so all of the anguish and heartache over practically nothing (“oh no, the lego piece didn’t go on. Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!”) is the hard part for me. But when no one is screaming, it’s great.

Not that it’s all that significant either way; the joys and the pains of parenting are both incidental to the real reason to do it: to participate with God in the act of generous creation. God made us out of nothing, and we make children out of ourselves and our environment. In so doing we become God’s creation of our children, and so by God’s gift we participate in God’s creative action. In a real sense part of God’s gift to us is to incorporate us into himself. The incarnation is the most striking aspect of this, but it is foreshadowed in our ability to create out of something (only God can create out of nothing). And this is of course why we must all take up our crosses and follow Christ; we are by God’s gift incorporated into God, and carrying his cross is, in Christ, part of God. There’s a fascinating thing Jesus said about how there is more rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner than over 99 who had no need of repentance; it seems like even God can fear, though for us not for Him.

And it is participating in this that is the point of parenting: creating new people so that you can then give more to them. We feed them and clothe them and teach them how to speak and think and ultimately how to be human; and all this we do not because they have given anything to us, or because they will give anything to us, but because they can receive it. It is not strictly true that the love of God is unconditional. It is not conditional on what we have done or on whether we will do anything for God, but it is (necessarily) conditional on whether we are capable of receiving it. This is also why it is utterly pointless to ask whether any created thing has a better lot than another created thing. The infinitude of God’s love means that every created thing will be given the maximum it is possible for it to receive; and there is no point in asking why you won’t be given what you couldn’t receive even if you were given it.

Incidentally, this incorporation into God is also why evil is possible; because it is given to us to be God’s goodness to each other, we can reject this incorporation into God and thus his goodness will not flow through us. This privation we call evil. It does not mean that we can prevent God from being good to his creation, only that by rejecting our role of being some particular goodness of God to his creation, we can make him have to give it in some other way, probably at some later time. As it has been said, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Or as Freidrich von Logau put it:

Gottes Mühlen mahlen langsam, mahlen aber trefflich klein,
ob aus Langmut er sich säumet, bringt mit Schärf ‘er alles ein.

Translated by Wadsworth as:

Though the mills of God grind slowly;
  Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting,
  With exactness grinds He all.

Good Morning November 27, 2016

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Good morning on this the twenty seventh day in November, in the Year of our Lord 2016.

I recently read a review of the movie Jerry Maguire which is a twenty year retrospective. Given that I first saw the movie in high school, it turns out it’s been a while. And yet I remember the movie surprisingly well. Or rather, as we do with all movies, I remember pieces of it very well. (In general, I’ve discovered, no one remembers the boring parts of Dr. Strangelove. To me they’re memorable as examples of how much Kubrick wasn’t a great director, which is relevant because I took part of a course in college about how he was. Anyway.) Probably the most famous scene was “You had me at hello.” which was a great response to a heartfelt speech by Jerry, and—aside from the overly clever and blunt dialog—possibly the most realistic scene in the movie. Very little in life is ever decided by the content of impassioned speeches.

The other very famous line from the movie—”You complete me.”—is far more questionable. As a fun thing, I know someone who had a guy try to use that line on her. It was only a year or two after the movie came out, and if I recall correctly, she suppressed a laugh in favor of simply telling him not to quote a movie at her. Ah, teenagers. It’s bad theology, of course, since only God completes people, but if one gives it the benefit of the doubt, it could simply be a reference to complementarity. Complementarity is the idea that men and women are different in matching ways that work well together. But this is nearly the opposite of being completed, at least in the sense of being happy, because complementarity is a tension. It is ideally a tension with respect, but it cannot be anything but a tension. If one is too swift where the other is too slow they will balance each other out, but it will not be a restful balance. If one thinks too much of the moment while the other thinks too much of the future, it will again be a balance, but not an easy balance. And of course it will only be a balance when both have an idea of the Aristotelian mean between the two competing virtues which they embody so that when this tension is resolved near the ideal, both will recognize that this balance is better than if they had gotten their own way without compromise. That one should not always get one’s way unchecked is something only ever learned, it is never instinctive, and it is never restful. Our souls are restless till they rest in God. So like so many things in art, it’s a good line if you take it the right way, and a terrible line if you take it the wrong way.

Good Morning November 26, 2016

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Good morning on this the twenty sixth day of November, in the year of our Lord 2016.

Holidays make for very busy times, and as I’ve discovered over the years, about sixteen times so when you have little children you’re responsible for. Especially when they’re around other people’s little children they’re responsible for. My brother-in-law and his wife are over, staying with my parents-in-law, and so that makes for five children ranging from ages three months to seven years. The amount of energy and ability to create trouble seemingly out of thin air (but really by using couches, chairs, walls, and floors) is astonishing.

Which also gets to the heart of the failure of a great many philosophies. Both communism and Objectivism are failures if anyone ever tries them, though of the two communism will always be worse because Objectivism does nothing to stamp out the religious impulse in man which will make the Hobbesian fight of all-against-all more cooperative, while communism will generally murder all of the religious people, or die trying (it never managed to succeed completely). Be that as it may, one of the biggest failings of both is that they seem to have been constructed for a race of men who is never born and who never dies. This seems to be a trait common to beliefs popular among relatively rich people; they take little notice of how life is actually lived, especially for the common man, and extend this moment into forever.

Both Marxism and Objectivism assume that all people are economic producers, but children are not economic producers. Of course marxism and objectivism don’t literally assume that children don’t exist, but they both treat children so unrealistically that they might as well assume children away. Marxism collectivises children, but in general the only people who love children enough to put up with all of the work and stress and misery and pain that raising children entails are the child’s parents. There are people who step into the role of parents, but they bond to only a few children who they believe will stay with them forever; they act like parents and have the same needs as parents. And among these needs, commonly, is the need to teach one’s children and the need to have a strong bi-directional bond with one’s children. Marxism gives these to the state; though in practice it did generally leave children with their parents rather than turning all children into orphans (as it should have) because however unrealistic marxists are, they weren’t suicidal. The most dangerous place in the world to be is between a healthy parent and its child.

Objetivism isn’t very coherent, and I do think that sometimes it’s just repudiating some collectivist concept which no sane person (but alas too many marxists) have espoused, but under misleading terminology. Having said that, it was very clear from the first 150 pages of Atlas Shrugged that Ayn Rand doesn’t really believe that children are children; they’re all miniature adults. Presumably she knows that babies have nothing to trade their parents, and equally presumably she came up with some explanation to cover this glaring flaw in her scheme, but until you actually raise children (Rand never did), you don’t have any sense of just how much raising children is carrying a very cute cross with more than a few splinters in it. It’s good work. It’s worthwhile work. It’s a participation in God’s boundless generosity and therefore a source of happiness. What it isn’t is comfortable work. If you don’t tap into the source of all life, it is soul-crushing work. All good work is, of course; you must exert energy to lift heavy things, and if you don’t eat, you will exhaust yourself quickly lifting heavy things. All really good work is like that. It takes from you because you have something to give. Only God gives to us without asking or needing anything in return. That’s why God is the source of all success, and why saints get so much done.

Good Morning November 25, 2016

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Good morning on this the twenty fifth day of November, in the year of our Lord 2016.

I hope those of you who celebrate had a happy thanksgiving yesterday. It was so busy I wasn’t able to write a post yesterday, but I did put out this video:

So far it hasn’t triggered as many atheists as I thought it might. Just one in the comments and a few on Twitter. I mean it very sincerely, so who knows, perhaps the core of well-wishing discourages argument. Maybe the title “Happy Thanksgiving” (or being posted on thanksgiving) just discourages viewing.

Speaking of comments, I’ve noticed I’ve been finding it harder to be patient with the really dumb comments on youtube. I’m happy to argue with people who disagree with me, but when a comments consists of both obviously missing the point of what I said and then making a few bare assertions with no argument of any kind, it’s very hard to see how there’s any value in that. So far I haven’t really moderated the comments on my videos in any way (unsurprisingly, the comments on my blog posts, though significantly fewer, tend to be much higher quality). Youtube comment sections aren’t exactly known for their quality, and I’m not looking to get into the censorship business. On the other hand, I’m getting tired of comments which are simply a mean-spirited waste of time. I suspect that deleting them will be tilting at windmills, but I might do it ad-experimentum.

In other news I’ve been reading the Vulkan API tutorial more, and I downloaded lwjgl (Light Weight Java Game Library, it’s basically what the name implies, and is used by Minecraft and other games). I’m really interested in tinkering around with it, so I think I’m actually going to give it a shot. The earliest I could possibly get Order of the Wilds done is several years from now, so don’t expect anything, and I’m not giving up on novel writing, youtube videos, or blogging either, so in the best case I won’t have much time for it. Oh, and I’m still going to be working on making longbows, too. At any given time I have way more hobbies than I can possibly fit into the hours of the day, and these days add three little children on top of that. (The full-time job as a programmer is a constant.) Like I said, it’s a good day when I get done half the things I want to. 🙂

Have a good day and God bless you.

Good Morning November 23rd, 2016

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Good morning on this the twenty third day of November, in the year of our Lord 2016.

The second set of replacement fluorescent bulbs has arrived, so I’ll be able to replace those in the upstairs light fixture which is above the stairs. It will be nice to have lights which turn on when the switch is thrown. Which of course brings up the issue of how much we can take modern technology for granted. Thousands of people’s work goes into light bulbs producing light on demand with a switch, some of them probably long dead. The house was built in 1953, so if the electrician who ran the wires was 16 then, he’d be 79 now. He might possibly still be alive, but it’s not likely. (Our hypothetical electrician would have been born in 1937 and spent his early years living through the rationing of World War II.) The copper in the wires would have been turned into wire some time before that, and the copper ore smelted into copper before then, and the copper ore dug up prior to that, and the copper mine discovered still earlier. Then there are the people who operate the power plant which supplies us with electricity, and the people who built the plant before them, and so on.

We live in a very complex world, in the west, and are far more interdependent than we like to think. But this also means that we also benefit each other more than we tend to think about; rich and poor, there are tends of thousands of people who do things which our lives are better for, and on the eve of Thanksgiving (here in America) it’s a good time to think about them.

It’s also a good time to contemplate the reality of complex entities. So many people are reductionists, thinking that the composite things we see in this world are mere illusions and their composite parts are the only reality. Our bodies are just cells and our cells are just sub-atomic particles, etc. They’re never consistent with this, of course, since to be consistent with it would be to be completely inhuman, but I think it’s good to consider the reality of composition since in our contingent world, all things are contingent and thus have another reality behind them. Or in other words, nothing in this world is God. If you make God the minimum qualification for reality, nothing in our world is real. There is, then, a subsidiary reality which is real, since there is clearly something besides God.

Good Morning November 22, 2016

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Good morning on this the twenty second day of November, in the year of our Lord 2016.

I’ve been watching the music video for Lindsey Stirling’s Hold My Heart, featuring ZZ Ward:

The imagery is very interesting. I’m thinking of doing a video about this at some point, but there’s a curious visual style in music videos used to convey the idea that we’re watching something of great importance.

One of the very common ones is backup dancers. When you have several people moving in sync with the main singer, it makes them seem important. Several people concentrating on one person ordinarily means that there is something important about that person, in the moment, anyway. Also that the person who is the focus, and where all the backup dancers can see them, is being copied also suggests importance. People usually only copy what’s worth copying.

But it’s interesting how ZZ (an initialism from her name, Zsuzsanna) is presented. She’s dressed very ornately, in a large chair, and is moving with large, exaggerated movements. It looks very important, but why? If that were in real life it would look absurd. Anyone who has known a goth is familiar with the absurdity of self-important presentation, even when it looks good in stillness. So why does it work? ZZ is pretty, but not breathtakingly so. And the way she sits in the chair reminds me of Lady Catherine from the A&E/BBC co-production of Pride & Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle), and yet here it looks good. Why?

I submit it’s because of the camera work. Lady Catherine is an antagonist in Pride & Prejudice, and the camera keeps its distance from her. It lingers unflatteringly, after moments of activity into moments of stillness. The camera clearly doesn’t like her. Whereas with ZZ, the camera moves in a way to suggest it’s entranced by her. It lingers on unimportant moments where something is about to happen, as if anticipating something good, then cuts away before they happen, as if we couldn’t bear that much greatness. It’s very subtle and I’m not describing it well, and I don’t mean to suggest it’s manipulating the viewer. It’s an art form; all (beautiful) art consists of suggestion. Reality comes to us at its own pace; art works by suggesting more of reality than fits in a moment, but since the art itself is real, it can only do that by suggestion, not by actuality. “Art unveils worlds of meaning” is how I heard Heidegger said it. This is also, I think, why Nietzsche hoped for the overman through art; because art suggests more reality than fits into a moment, it suggests the possibility of a greater reality than we have access to at present. Alas, only beholding the beatific vision can actually contain that. The only one who could ever be the overman poor Nietzsche hoped for is God himself.

 

Good Morning November 21, 2016

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Good morning on this the 21st of November, in the year of our Lord 2016.

So I’ve been reading a tutorial on the Vulkan API, which is a code library for doing 3D rendering using a video card. It was designed recently  by the same people who made the previous standard (openGL) to reflect what modern video cards are like, and to be able to get maximum performance out of them. Since everything new is better (*wink*) I decided to check it out, especially since any game I write won’t come out for years (little children leave little time and are more important). It’s low-level and I can see how it would be high performance; it’s also complicated and certainly not designed to be easy to use. I kind of think I’m going to give it a try.

One of the cool things about games in general, and possibly especially about 3D games, is that it’s very doable to build them in pieces, where one tinkers with parts, occasionally adding features. Which is fun, low-stress, and rewarding. Terrible way to get something done on a deadline, but a great learning experience.

Which brings up the interesting topic of tinkering. Curiously, tinkers were originally itinerant tinsmiths who would fix tin goods, especially, I believe, pots and pans. At first glance this seems a bit strange, and tin has a very low melting point—less than 500 degree Fahrenheit. If you stick a pot over a fire, the outside of it will be exposed to temperatures higher than that. However, upon further research, it turns out that tin was used to line the inside of the pots and pans. Tin sticks well to iron, and unlike iron doesn’t rust. A very thin layer of tin on the inside of a pot or pan would prevent corrosion, but would be at very nearly the same temperature as the food which, especially if water is used in the cooking, will not go much above the boiling point of water. The result is pans that won’t rust. Apparently lots of other things used to be made of tin because it was easy to work; tinsmiths therefore had to be very adaptable to fixing whatever someone had made before them. Also curious is that whereas iron tends to be worked hot, tin tends to be worked cold. (Hence someone who smiths iron is a blacksmith, from all of the soot, whereas someone who works tin is a whitesmith, because it’s so much cleaner, I gather.)

Anyway¸ whatever its origins, tinkering has come to mean trying things and working things out for oneself and making things work without a detailed plan beforehand. (Especially doing so in stages on something that has some functionality already) No one wants to travel over a bridge which was made by tinkering, but a great many things do work this way, and it’s a great deal of fun to tinker on things. This is especially true of software, I think, where by keeping a copy of the old code around before one started tinkering, in the worst case you just toss out the changes that didn’t work and try something else. It’s sort of a compromise between the hard work of starting from scratch and the very easy work of playing video games; the rewards come easier than the former but not as easily as in the latter, but they do have the reality and permanence of the former, if not always the durability. Like with most good things, the key is balance. Narrow goods must never be allowed to become universal, or they become tyrannical. But, kept in their place—in balance with other goods—they can blossom and become very good indeed.

Good Morning November 20th, 2016

On By Christopher LansdownIn Rambles, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Good morning on this the 20th of November, in the year of our Lord 2016. It’s amazing how much children scream. Not when they’re in pain; granted they scream a bit then, but I’ve found that children are often more stoical about physical pain (in the sense of stubbing your toe) than they are about disappointment. They build so much expectation into everything, and at the same time have no filters on the emotions they present to the world. The problem for adults is that not only do we heavily filter the emotions which we present to the world, but we know that other adults do the same thing and so we interpret how strong their emotions really are by inverting this filter. In essence, if people are wrapping their mouths in a thick scarf when they talk, we then hold a megaphone up so we can hear. Well, this works very badly when someone is not filtering their emotions, just like holding a megaphone up to someone’s mouth would work badly if they’re speaking at normal volume. The result is kind of exhausting. It also doesn’t help that children are changing all the time so you can never really get used to them, because by the time you have they’re behaving differently.

In other news, I’ve started reading a tutorial on the Vulkan API. (It’s a new, high performance 3D rendering API.)  It looks interesting, though a fairly large amount of work, but on the other hand one thing about games in general and especially 3D games is that you can start small, implementing just one thing, then eventually start adding things to it. I don’t have the time to be doing this, of course, but what the heck; if one waited to have time for things, one would never get anything done. I think that I might try out rendering procedurally generated terrain, and then walking around in it. How hard can that be, right? 😉

Good Morning, November 19th 2016

On By Christopher LansdownIn Rambles, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Good morning on this the nineteenth of November, in the year of our Lord 2016. I missed posting yesterday, but today will make three out of four, which isn’t too bad. Yesterday was very busy, as you might imagine, and since I’m hoping to write each day in the morning, a friday morning meeting made it hard.

I had a curious exchange with a commenter on one of my videos (Atheism vs. Meaning) where he basically took what I said to be something completely different and concluded I was very wrong. This happens to all people with surprising frequency; a great many people never ask what another person means by their words, they only ever ask what they themselves would have meant by the words the other person said. There’s a great line Father Brown has in the story The Invisible Man:

Have you ever noticed this–that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean–or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, `Is anybody staying with you?’ the lady doesn’t answer `Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and so on,’ though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says `There is nobody staying with us,’ meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, `Who is staying in the house?’ then the lady will remember the butler, the parlourmaid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly.

But this very often goes wrong; the fellow in question thought that when I said that atheism must deny meaning, that I meant that all atheists must be unhappy. As a matter of fact they are, because all fallen creatures are unhappy, but that’s beside the point for the moment. I was discussing meaning, and for some reason all he could hear was that I was discussing practical happiness. It’s very annoying when people have arguments with other people and use me as a stand-in for the people they want to be arguing with.

On another subject, I learned that Minecraft was inspired by the game Infiniminer (which never really became popular). They had in common the block-based world and mining; minecraft added in a quasi-rpg element with swords and spells and crafting items out of the things mined. This got me to thinking about what sort of game I would make inspired by Minecraft. I’ve never successfully made a game before; the closest I got was a slightly playable top-scrolling space fighter game. I may someday go and finish it, as it would be fun to play, and in any event it will be some time before I actually have time to seriously code on my own projects any more. Between work and three children, I don’t really have the spare brainpower left over. (Mostly it’s the kids; young children need a lot of time and emotional energy, and they come first.) But I think I hit on an interesting idea for a game which I would like to make some day. (The other game I’d like to write is a realtime strategy game in the genre of StarCraft, which I intend to call Violent Conflict Resolution, and feature the ability to write up complex orders for units before playing, so the game is more about strategy than instructions-per-minute that one can issue. I just don’t like twitch games, whether first-person-shooter or realtime strategy.

Anyway, the idea I came up with is this: Order of the Wilds. The main character is a wizard in the Order of the Wilds, which is an order of warrior wizard engineers who vow to go into the wilderness and make it fit for mankind. The basic idea is one would start off in a city, then go off into the wilderness, far away, conquer the things which spawn monsters, drive away tribes of monsters, etc. then found a city and make a road back to the original city. After doing that, one would go do it again, conquering more of the world. The founding of the city would probably consists largely of building the city wall and a church, which would suppress the undead from rising. I’m thinking that like minecraft it would be a voxel-based world where one can put things anywhere, as well as be able to mine for resources. I’m thinking that the warrior-sorcery engineer would, after taking his vow, venture forward with three things, aside from clothing: an enchanted hand-pick, which would never break and could be used to mine anything (basically like fists in minecraft, except making a tiny bit of sense), a magical backpack of holding which would explain why one can carry around many cubic meters of stone, and a cloak, which can be used for camouflage and sleeping at night in the wilderness.

I’m thinking that unlike minecraft, it would have a variety of weapons, and unlike most RPGs, the different weapons would actually have different sizes. This way a spear gives you a long range but stops working if the other guy gets too close. A long sword would have a longer reach but would be slower than a short sword, etc. Also possibly different woods can be used to made different kinds of bows, etc.

Incidentally, a warrior-engineer-wizard is not as absurd as it sounds; the roman army proved how useful it is to have all of one’s soldiers be engineers, too. And while RPGs often follow highschool stereotypes of jocks-versus-geeks being developed into fighters versus wizards, in reality exercise and mastering one’s body help with mastering one’s mind; further I think most good magic systems require physical endurance to work magic; since magic is basically a human being a conduit for magical energy that exists ubiquitously in nature, it makes vastly more sense for them to need endurance to withstand channeling the energy than to be capacitors who store it up as mana and then expend it. The latter is workable, and still much better than AD&D 2nd edition mechanics of memorizing spells that get wiped from one’s memory (and worse, memorizing a spell more than once if one wants to ask it more than once!), but I think a unified stamina system makes vastly more sense.

Another interesting dynamic I was thinking of added is having a minecraft-like food system, and having male and female characters as options where the male character is stronger but needs more food. This is:

  1. Realistic
  2. An interesting balance

I’m thinking it won’t be a huge difference, especially given that either way the character is a wizard and enchanted weapons and armor (and generally useful spells) will tend to even things out anyway.

This does introduce one problem when it comes to sacraments, though. It would be possible to make a male character a priest, which takes care of the availability of sacraments. On the other hand, being a priest might well complicate things; warrior-priests are in a very strange place, to say the least. On the other hand, doing without the sacraments for a while is doable—I don’t believe that sailors had ready access to the sacraments, for example. And it will be possible to travel back to the original city, so possibly it could be a thing periodically restocked. Perhaps the character could carry around a small gold box with a supply of the consecrated host as a special exception made for exceptional circumstances. And the order of the wilderness would make sense as a religious order. Granted, magic and religious orders don’t go together in our world, but that’s largely because magic consists of harnessing demons to do one’s bidding. In a world where humans can act as conduits for natural energy, magic would be natural, and so there would be no tension. And magic could be easily made rare by, for example, requiring the wizard to embed a special gemstone into his chest; the ability to be a wizard would be as limited as the gemstones, and therefore arbitrarily limitable. (This would also work well with a religious order, because the powers of the kingdom would possibly supply such stones to the order who uses them to expand kingdoms into the wilderness.)

Overall I think this fairly workable, and at the same time not so grand in scope that it’s utterly undoable for a small team. Some work needs to go into trade-offs; game mechanics like weapon length/range are very easy to do since the combat engine needs to take distance into account anyway. And a seeded, programmatically generated world takes work, of course, but way less money than hiring a ton of artists and voice actors does. Anyway, it’s going to be quite some time before I get a chance to start on it, but I may take a look at lwjg3 just to see how much work getting anything at all done is. There’s no harm in playing around a little before a serious start. 🙂

And on a random note, it is amazing how much my one year old daughter loves David Hasselhoff’s version of Hooked on a Feeling. Her brothers before her loved it, too, though.

Good Morning, November 17, 2016

On By Christopher LansdownIn RamblesLeave a comment

So, consistent with my intention of writing something off-the-cuff each day, here goes. 🙂

It’s amazing how much work is involved in doing the simplest thing in an older house. In the upstairs there are some recessed fluorescent fixtures which look like they date from the 1950s when our house was built (I just looked it up; fluorescent lights were commercialized in the 1920s) and the ballasts are probably original. (If you don’t know, fluorescent lights work by passing electricity through an inert gas which excites mercury vapor to emit UV light which gets absorbed by a coating on the glass which then fluoresces in the visible spectrum. The problem is that as the gas becomes progressively ionized it becomes a better conductor, so on its own it would behave like a short-circuit and blow your circuit breaker in moments. The ballast prevents this by limiting the current to the maximum operating current.) Anyway, the lights have been deteriorating, and recently stopped working altogether. I had taken one out in order to blow some insulation into the attic, and so I finally replaced it.

Or rather, modified then replaced it. I had ordered some LED tube replacements which fit in place of the old fluorescent tubes but require the fixture to be rewired so the bulbs are directly wired to the house current, bypassing the ballast. That was the easy part. Unfortunately some previous owner of the house had taken the light fixture out before, and the old metal-clad electrical wiring only just stretched to the box; so instead of taking the trouble to put it back in, they just spliced in some NM cable (NM stands for non-metalic, it’s the plastic-jacketed wiring that one is used to seeing in new residential construction) and left the splice open above the ceiling. This violates the national fire code rather badly in two ways:

  1. Junctions between electrical wires should always be in electrical boxes (there are a few exceptions for special devices which are not relevant here).
  2. Those electrical boxes should always be accessible without having to rip out drywall. Decorative covers are fine, but it is not OK to bury a junction box in a wall. (Again, there are a few devices approved for that sort of thing, but it’s not relevant here.)

So I did go to the trouble to actually pulling the metal-clad original wiring back into the box. Given that the light fixture was essentially wedged between two joists and a tight fit with the plaster, this wasn’t easy, and moreover it would have been great to have an extra arm or two, but eventually with a fair amount of sweat and dirt falling on my head, it was in, and wired correctly. It’s nice having light in the upstairs hallway again. I can recommend those LED replacement bulbs, by the way, if you have any 2 foot fluorescent fixtures to replace. There aren’t many options that I can find, so I’m very glad of that. By contrast if you want to replace 4ft bulbs, there are tons of options, including ones stocked at local home improvement stores.

I also had an interesting conversation recently with a friend about a youtuber’s commentary on a Star Trek episode, and how this commentary seemed very at odds with the person’s often aggressively-taken political stance. Using fiction as escapism is a very common thing, but I think we mostly think of it as escaping the details of life. Whether it’s the stress of too little money or too much work or boredom or problems in a relationship or whatever, these are all specifics that one wants to escape from. But I think that there are also people who use fiction to escape from the hideous consequences of their philosophies of life. For example, I suspect that most Materialists suspend their disbelief in free will and read fiction as if the choices the characters made are real choices, and are not pre-determined by the initial configuration of the matter which makes up them and their environment. This is somewhat analogous to what Chesterton said in Orthodoxy about how poetry nearly saved Cowper:

Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

(For those not familiar with Chesterton, he is only arguing in favor of mysticism in its proper relation to reason; he is not denigrating reason. In fact he wrote a biography of Saint Thomas Aquinas which was very high praise of perhaps the most reasonable man who ever lived, and Chesterton very specifically praised Saint Thomas’s use of reason.) There is a great deal of pseudo-intellectualism in our day, which I think accounts for the popularity of reductionist philosophies. Materialism reduces everything to matter, Marxism reduces everything to economics and class conflict, Freudianism reduces everything to sexual instincts, and so on. (These are not perhaps the most popular forms of reductionism today, at least in name, but the modern forms are mostly just variants of these older forms.) The basic pattern of reductionism is simple: it’s hard to understand the world, and it’s much easier to understand the world if we shrink the world down to one idea. Why people want to understand what is obviously just a phantasm in their head inspired by the real world, I cannot say, but I think it’s related to so many people going through so much schooling where fairly ordinary people are told that they’re very smart. Trying to make sense of being very smart but the world not being very intelligible results, I think, in solving the cognitive dissonance by shrinking the world. I suspect this is done not so much because people want to think well of themselves, but because they want to think well of the authorities in their lives, and those authorities can only be thought well of if they themselves are as smart as they’ve been told. So far from hubris, I think it’s a very mis-placed humility; at its heart is trusting the world far more than it should be trusted. When Socrates was told that he was the wisest man, his conclusion was that it was because he knew his limits. It’s a good lesson for all of us, though Socrates lived in the wrong time and place to benefit from God’s self-revelation to us.

Anyway, I think that many people who are trapped in these reductionist systems feel the strain of being a human being living in a box that isn’t big enough for a worm, and they are desperate for some relief. And this is a role that fiction plays for them. It lets them, for a time, escape the cramped universe they’ve been stuffed into. Pray for them.

It’s a Good Day When I Get Half the Things Done I Want To

On By Christopher LansdownIn RamblesLeave a comment

So I haven’t been writing on this blog much lately, which follows the pattern of other blogs I’ve run over the last 15 years or so. To some degree it’s natural that I have a lot of pent-up things to write, then once I get them out the rate at which I write new things is reduced and then with a reduced frequency of writing I fall out of the habit. I’ve also never really had a popular blog, which is fine—I’m happy to write for whoever reads it, as I trust God to put what I write in front of who should read it, however many or few people that is—but it doesn’t provide the same sort of motivation as knowing people are expecting one to post things. But the other trap I fall into is writing a fair number of edited essays, I tend to build up the expectation (for myself) that everything I write will be like that: an important subject, addressed in a considered way. Which is great, except that it requires a lot of work and therefore a lot of time.

So I think I’m going to be posting a lot more in the Rambling category, as I can find five minutes a day to talk about whatever is on my mind. It won’t be as worth reading, but it will probably be more personal and some interesting points might come up in the process. And as the subject of this post indicates, given that I’ve got several big work projects, and three young children who need a ton of attention and work, not to mention a household to do half the maintenance on, I’ve got to be careful to keep my secondary activities small or they just won’t get done for the next few years. Not that I’ll never post a more essay-like post in the other categories, but at least for the moment here’s the plan.

Speaking of blogs, I finally signed up for an RSS reader a month or two ago, and it’s really nice. (The reader is called newsblur. There’s a free, limited but useful, version; the premium, unlimited, version is $24/yr.) It does a reasonably good job, but as much as anything it’s great to have an RSS reader again.  It was a really awful thing that google did when it killed off RSS readers by offering their free (and reasonably high quality) rss reader, then killing it off. I suspect that the blogosphere took a big hit from that, as RSS readers are an excellent way to keep up with blogs. I don’t know whether google did that on purpose; this is the sort of thing to which Hanlon’s Razor (never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity) can explain. Still, you never do know. There is a fair amount of malice in the world. Not as much as many people think, but more than people who have led sheltered lives tend to think, too.

And if you’re interested, I finally got my review of the movie Legion up. Back to editing the audio for chapter four in my project to do a full reading of Chesterton’s masterpiece, Orthodoxy.

Authority Figures in Movies

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

One of the curious things about the roles of authority figures in movies is that they are very rarely played by people who have ever had any authority. One might think that this wouldn’t have too much of an impact since the actors are just reciting dialog which other people wrote. (People who most of the time haven’t had any authority themselves, but that’s a somewhat separate matter.) And in the end, authority is the ability to use force to compel people, so does it matter much what the mannerisms an actor uses are?

Actually, yes, because in fact a great deal of authority, in practice, is about using social skills to get people to cooperate without having to use one’s authority. And a great deal of social skills are body language, tone of voice, emphasis, and pacing. Kind of like the famous advice given by Dalton in Road House:

For some reason, authority figures are usually portrayed as grim and stern—at this point I think because it’s a shorthand so you can tell who is who—but there is a great deal which can be accomplished by smiling. There’s an odd idea that many people seem to have that smiling is only sincere if it is an instinctual, uncontrollable reaction. I’ve no idea where this crazy notion came from, but in fact smiling is primarily a form of communication. It communicates that one is not (immediately) a threat, that (in the moment) one intends cooperation, that the order of the moment is conversation rather than action. Like all communication it can of course be a lie, but the solution to that is very simple: don’t lie with your smile. Words can be lies, but the solution is not to refrain from speaking unless you can’t help yourself; it’s to tell the truth when one opens one’s mouth. So tell the truth when you smile with your mouth, too. And since actions are choices, one very viable option, if you smile at someone, is to follow through and (in the moment) be nice.

Anyone (sane) who has a dog knows that in many ways they’re terrible creatures. They steal your food, destroy everyday items, throw up on your floor when they’ve eaten things that aren’t food, get dog hair everywhere, and make your couches stink of dog. And yet, people love dogs who do these things to them for a very simple reason: any time you come home, your dog smiles at you and wags its tail and is glad to see you. And it’s human nature that it’s impossible to be angry at someone who is just so gosh darned happy that you’re in the same room as them.

People in authority are rarely there because they have a history of failure and incompetence at dealing with people; it may be a convenient movie shorthand that people in authority are stone-faced, grumpy, and stern, but in real life people in positions of authority are generally friendly. It’s easy to read too much into that friendliness, of course—they’re only friendly so long as you stay on the right side of what you’re supposed to be doing—but this unrealistic movie shorthand makes for far less interesting characters.

And I suppose I should note that there are some people in positions of authority who are often stone-faced and grim, but these are usually the people responsible for administering discipline to those already known to be transgressors. This is especially true of those dealing with children, who have little self control and less of a grasp of the gravity of most situations they’re in and who need all the help they can get in realizing that it’s not play time. By contrast, during the short time I was able to take part in my parish’s prison ministry, I noticed that the prison guards were generally friendly (if guardedly so) with the inmates. Basically, being friendly can invite people to try to take liberties, but being grumpy usually gets far less cooperation, and outside of places like Nazi death camps where you are actually willing to shoot people for being uncooperative, cooperation is usually far more useful than people trying to take liberties and having to be told “no” is inconvenient.

But most of the actors who play authority figures don’t know any of this; and when you research the individual actors they often turn out to be goofballs who don’t like authority and whose portrayal of it is largely formed by what they most dislike about it.

Atheism is Not a Religion

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Philosophy5 Comments

This is the script to my video, Atheism is Not a Religion. As always, it was written to be listened to when I read it aloud, but it should be pretty readable as text, too.

Today we’re going to look at a topic which a casual survey of atheist youtube channels and twitter feeds suggests is of importance to many atheists: that atheism is not a religion. Now, since the one thing you can’t convict internet atheists of is originality, I assume that this is because there are Christians who claim that atheism is a religion. Of course what they probably mean by this that atheism entails a set of metaphysical beliefs. And this is true enough, at least as a practical assumption if some atheists will scream at you until they’re blue in the face that it’s not what they believe in theory. But merely having metaphysical beliefs does not make something a religion; it makes it a philosophy or in more modern terms, a world-view. But a religion is far more than merely a world-view or a set of beliefs. As Saint James noted, the demons believe in God.

The first and most obvious thing which atheism lacks is: worship. Atheists do not worship anything. I know that Auguste Comte tried to remedy this with his calendar of secular holidays, but that went nowhere and has been mostly forgotten except perhaps in a joke G. K. Chesterton made about it. A few atheists have made a half-hearted go of trying to worship science. And if that had any lasting power, Sunday services might include playing a clip from Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. But the would-be science worshippers haven’t gotten that far, and it is highly doubtful they ever will.

Secular Humanism is sometimes brought up as something like a religious substitute, but so far it only appears to be a name, a logo, some manifestos no one cares about, and the belief that maybe it’s possible to have morality without religion. And humanity is not a workable object of worship anyway. First, because it’s too amorphous to worship—as Chesterton noted, a god composed of seven billion persons neither dividing the substance nor confounding the persons is hard to believe in. The other reason is that worshipping humanity involves worshipping Hitler and Stalin and Mao and so forth.

Which brings us to Marxism, which is perhaps the closest thing to a secular religion so far devised. But while Marxism does focus the believer’s attention on a utopia which will someday arrive, and certainly gets people to be willing to shed an awful lot of innocent blood to make it happen sooner, I don’t think that this really constitutes worship. It’s a goal, and men will kill and die for goals, but they can’t really worship goals. Goals only really exist in the people who have them, and you can only worship what you believe actually exists.

It is sometimes argued that within a marxist utopia people worship the state, but while this is something put on propaganda posters, the people who lived in marxist nations don’t report anyone actually engaging in this sort of worship, at least not sincerely.

And I know that some people will say that atheists worship themselves—I suspect because almost all atheists define morality as nothing more than a personal preference—but, at least I’ve never seen that as anything more than a half-hearted attempt to answer the question of “what is the ground of morality”, rather than any sort of motivating belief. And in any event, it is inherently impossible to worship oneself. Worshipping something is recognizing something as above oneself, and it is not possible to place oneself above oneself. I think the physical metaphor suffices: if you are kneeling, you can’t look up and see your own feet. You might be able to see an image of yourself in a mirror, but that is not the same, and whatever fascination it might have is still not worship. So no, atheism does not worship anything.

The second reason why atheism is not a religion is that atheism gives you no one to pray to. Prayer is a very interesting phenomenon, and is much misunderstood by those who are not religious and, frankly, many who are, but it is, at its core, talking with someone who actually understands what is said. People do not ever truly understand each other because the mediation of words always strips some of the meaning away and the fact that every word means multiple things always introduces ambiguity. Like all good things in religion this reaches its crescendo in Christianity, but even in the public prayers said over pagan altars, there is the experience of real communication, in its etymological sense. Com—together unication—being one. It is in prayer—and only in prayer—that we are not alone. Atheists may decry this as talking with our imaginary friends if they like—and many of them certainly seem to like to—but in any event they are left where all men who are not praying are left: alone in the crowd of humanity, never really understood and so only ever loved very imperfectly at best. (I will note that this point will be lost on people who have never taken the trouble to find out what somebody else really means, and so assumes that everyone else means exactly the same things that he would mean by those words, and so assumes that all communication goes perfectly. You can usually identify such people by the way they think that everyone around them who doesn’t entirely agree with them is stupid. It’s the only conclusion left open to them.)

The third reason why atheism is not a religion is that it does not, in any way, serve the primary purpose of religion. The thing you find common to all religions—the thing at the center of all religions—is putting man into his proper relation with all that is; with the cosmos, in the Greek sense of the word. Anyone who looks at the world sees that there is a hierarchy of being; that plants are more than dust and beasts are more than plants and human beings are more than beasts. But if you spend any time with human beings—and I mean literally any time—you will immediately know that human beings are not the most that can be. All that we can see and hear and smell and taste and touch in this world forms an arrow which does not point at us but does run through us, pointing at something else. The primary purpose of a religion is to acknowledge that and to get it right. Of course various religions get it right to various degrees; those who understand that it points to an uncreated creator who loved the world in existence out of nothing get it far more right than those who merely believe in powerful intelligences which are beyond ours. Though if you look carefully, even those who apparently don’t, seem to often have their suspicions that here’s something important they don’t know about. But be that as it may, all religions know that there is something more than man, and give its adherents a way of putting themselves below what they are below; of standing in a right relation to that which is above them. In short, the primary purpose of all religion is humility.

And this, atheism most certainly does not have. It doesn’t matter whether you define atheism as a positive denial or a passive lack; either way atheism gives you absolutely no way to be in a right relationship to anything above you, because it doesn’t believe in anything above you. Even worse, atheism as a strong tendency, at least in the west, to collapse the hierarchy of being in the other direction, too. It is no accident that pets are acquiring human rights and there are some fringe groups trying to sue for the release of zoo animals under the theory of habeus corpus. Without someone who intended to make something out of the constituent particles which make us up, there is ultimately no reason why any particular configuration of quarks and electrons should mean anything more than any other one; human beings are simply the cleverest of the beasts that crawl the earth, and the beasts are simply the most active of the dust which is imprisoned on the earth.

We each have our preferences, of course, but anyone with any wide experience of human beings knows that we don’t all have the same preferences, and since the misanthropes are dangerous and have good reason to lie to us those who don’t look out for themselves quickly become the victims of those who do. Call it foreigners or racists or patriarchy or gynocentrism or rape culture or the disposable male or communism or capitalism or call it nature red in tooth and claw, if you want to be more poetic about it, but sooner or later you will find out that human beings, like the rest of the world, are dangerous.

Religious people know very well that other human beings are dangerous; there is no way in this world to get rid of temptation and sin. But religion gives the possibility of overcoming the collapsing in upon ourselves for which atheism gives no escape.

For some reason we always talk about pride puffing someone up, but this is almost the exact opposite of what it actually does. It’s an understandable mistake, but it is a mistake. Pride doesn’t puff the self up, it shrinks it down. It just shrinks the rest of the world down first.

In conclusion, I can see why my co-religionists would be tempted to say that atheism is a religion. There are atheist leaders who look for all the world like charismatic preachers and atheist organizations that serve no discernible secular purpose. Though not all atheists believe the same things, still, most believe such extremely similar things that they could identify on that basis. Individual atheists almost invariably hold unprovable dogmas with a blind certainty that makes the average Christian look like a skeptic. And so on; one could go on at length about how atheism looks like a religion. But all these are mere external trappings. Atheism is not a religion, which is a great pity because atheists would be far better off if it was.

Two Interesting Questions

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, PhilosophyLeave a comment

On Twitter, @philomonty, who I believe is best described as an agnostic (he can’t tell whether nihilism or Catholicism is true), made two video requests. Here are the questions he gave me:

  1. If atheism is a cognitive defect, how may one relieve it?
  2. How can an atheist believe in Christ, when he does not know him? Not everyone has mystical experiences, so not everyone has a point of contact which establishes trust between persons, as seen in everyday life.

I suspect that I will tackle these in two separate videos, especially because the second is a question which applies to far more than just atheists. They’re also fairly big questions, so it will take me a while to work out how I want to answer them. 🙂

The first question is especially tricky because I believe there are several different kind of cognitive defects which can lead to atheism. Not everyone is a mystic, but if a person who isn’t demands mystical experience as the condition for belief, he will go very wrong. If a person who is a mystic has mystical experiences but denies them, he will go very wrong, but in a different way. There are also people who are far too trusting of the culture they’re in, thinking that fitting into it is the fullness of being human, so they will necessarily reject anything which makes it impossible or even just harder to fit in. These two will go very wrong, but in a different way from the previous ones.

To some degree this is a reference to my friend Eve Keneinan’s view that atheism is primarily caused by some sort of cognitive defect, such as an inability to sense the numinous (basically, lacking a sensus divinitatus). Since I’ve never experienced that myself, I’m certain it can’t be the entire story, though to the degree that it is part of the story it would come under the category of non-mystics who demand mystical experience. Or, possibly, mystics who have been damaged by something, though I am very dubious about that possibility. God curtails the amount of evil possible in the world to what allows for good, after all, so while that is not a conclusive argument, it does seem likely to me that God would not permit anything to make it impossible for a person to believe in him.

Anyway, these are just some initial thoughts on the topic which I’ll be mulling over as I consider how to answer. Interesting questions.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

(This is the script for my video about the Dunning-Kruger effect. While I wrote it to be read out loud by someone who inflects words like I do, i.e. by me, it should be pretty readable as text.)

Today we’re going to be looking at the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is the other topic requested by PickUpYourPantsPatrol—once again thanks for the request!—and if you’ve disagreed with anyone in the internet in the last few years, you’ve probably been accused of suffering from it.

Perhaps the best summary of the popular version of the Dunning-Kruger effect was given by John Cleese:

The problem with people like this is that they have no idea how stupid they are. You see, if you are very very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you are very very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to know how stupid you are. There’s a wonderful bit of research by a guy called David Dunning who’s pointed out that to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. This means, if you’re absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the skills you need to know that you are absolutely no good at it.

There are plenty of things to say about this summary as well as the curious problem that if an idiot is talking to an intelligent person, absent reputation being available, there is a near-certainty that both will think the other an idiot. But before I get into any of that, I’d like to talk about the Dunning Kruger study itself, because I read the paper which Dunning and Kruger published in 1999, and it’s quite interesting.

The first thing to note about the paper is that it actually discusses four studies which the researchers did, trying to test specific ideas about incompetence and self-evaluation which the paper itself points out were already common knowledge. For example, they have a very on-point quotation from Thomas Jefferson. But, they note, this common wisdom that fools often don’t know that they’re fools has never been rigorously tested in the field of psychology, so they did.

The second thing to note about this study is that—as I understand is very common in psychological studies—their research subjects were all students taking psychology courses who received extra credit for participating. Now, these four studies were conducted in Cornell University, and the classes were all undergraduates, so right away generalizing to the larger population is immediately suspect since there’s good reason to believe that undergraduates in an Ivy League university have more than a few things in common which they don’t share with the rest of humanity. This is especially the case because the researchers were testing self-evaluation of performance, which is something that Cornell undergraduates were selected for and have a lot invested in. They are, in some sense, the elite of society, or so at least I suspect most of them have been told, even if not every one of them believes it.

Moreover, the tests which they were given—which I’ll go into detail about in a minute—were all academic tests, given to people who were there because they had generally been good at academics. Ivy League undergraduates are perhaps the people most likely to give falsely high impressions of how good they are at academic tests. This is especially the case if any of these were freshmen classes (they don’t say), since a freshman at an Ivy League school has impressed the admissions board but hasn’t had the opportunity to fail out yet.
So, right off the bat the general utility of this study in confirming popular wisdom is suspect; popular opinion may have to stand on its own. On the other hand, this may be nearly the perfect study to explain the phenomenon Nassim Nicholas Taleb described as Intellectual Yet Idiot—credentialed people who have the role of intellectuals yet little of the knowledge and none of the wisdom for acting the part.

Be that as it may, let’s look at the four studies described. The first study is in many ways the strangest, since it was a test of evaluating humor. They created a compilation of 30 jokes from several sources, then had a panel of 8 professional comedians rate these jokes on a scale from 1-11. After throwing out one outlier, they took the mean answers as the “correct” answers, then gave the same test to “65 cornell undergraduates from a variety of courses in psychology who earned extra credit for their participation”.
They found that the people with the bottom quartile of test scores, who by definition have an average rank of being at the twelfth percentile, guessed (on average) their rank was the 66th percentile. The bottom three quartiles overestimated their rank, while the top quartile underestimated their rank, thinking that they were in the (eyeballing it from the graph) 75th percentile when in fact (again, by definition) they were in the 88th.
This is, I think, the least interesting of the studies, first because the way they came up with “right” and “wrong” answers is very suspect, and second because this isn’t necessarily about mis-estimation of a person’s ability, but could be entirely about mis-estimating their peer’s ability. The fact that everyone put their average rank in the class at between the 66th percentile and 75th percentile may just mean that in default of knowing how they did, Cornell students are used to guessing that they got somewhere between a a B- and a B+. Given that they were admitted to Cornell, that guess may have a lot of history behind it to back it up.

The next test, though unfortunately only given to 45 Cornell students, is far more interesting both because it used 20 questions on logical reasoning taken from an LSAT prep book—so we’re dealing with questions where there is an unambiguously right answer—and because in addition to asking students how they thought they ranked, they asked the students how many questions they thought that they got right. It’s that last part that’s really interesting, because that’s a far more direct measure of how much the students thought that they knew. And in this case, the bottom quartile thought that they got 14.2 questions right while they actually got 9.6 right. The top quartile, by contrast, thought that they got 14 correct when they actually got 16.9 correct.

So, first, the effect does in fact hold up with unambiguous answers. The bottom quartile of performers thought that they got more questions right than they did. So far, so good. But the magnitude of the error is not nearly as great as it was for the ranking error, especially for the bottom quartile. Speaking loosely, the bottom quartile knew half of the material and thought that they knew three quarters of it. That is a significant error, in the sense of being a meaningful error, but at the same time they thought that they knew about 48% more than they did, not 48,000% more than they did. The 11 Cornell undergraduates who took this class did have an over-inflated sense of their ability, to be sure, but they also had a basic competence in the field. To put this in perspective, the top quartile only scored 76% better than the bottom quartile.

The next study was on 84 Cornell undergrads who were given a 20 question test of standard English grammar taken from a National Teacher Examination prep guide. This replicated the basic findings of the previous study, with the bottom quartile estimating they got 12.9 questions right versus a real score of 9.2. (Interestingly, the top quartile very slightly over-estimated their score as 16.9 when it was actually 16.4) Again, all these are averages so the numbers are a little wonky, but anyway this time they over-estimated their performance by 3.7 points, or 40%. And again, they got close to half the questions right, so this isn’t really a test of people who are incompetent.

There’s another thing to consider in both studies, which is how many questions the students thought they got wrong. In the first study they estimated 5.4 errors while in the second 7.1 errors, and while these were under-estimates, they were correct that they did in fact get that many wrong. Unfortunately these are aggregate numbers (asked after they handed the test in, I believe) so we don’t know their accuracy on gauging whether they got particular questions wrong, but in the first test they correctly estimated about 40% of their error and on the second test they correctly estimated about 65% of their error. That is, while they did unequivocally have an over-inflated sense of their performance, they were not wildly unrealistic about how much they knew. But of course these are both subjects they had studied in the past, and their test scores did demonstrate at least basic competence with them.

The fourth study is more interesting, in part because it was on a more esoteric subject: it was a 10 question test, given to 140 cornell undergrads, about set selection. Each problem described 4 cards and gave a rule which they might match. The question was which card or cards needed to be flipped over to determine if those cards do match the rule. Each question was like that, so we can see why they only asked ten questions.

They were asked to rate how they did in the usual way, but then half of them were given a short packet that took about 10 minutes to read explaining how to do these problems, while the other half was given an unrelated filler task that also took about 10 minutes. They were then asked to rate their performance again, and in fact the group who learned how to do the problems did revise their estimate of their performance, while the other group didn’t change it very much.

And in this test we actually see a gross mis-estimation of ability by the incompetent. The bottom quartile scored on average 0.3 questions correct, but initially thought that they had gotten about 5.5 questions correct. For reference, the top quartile initially thought that they had gotten 8.9 questions correct while they had in fact gotten all ten correct. And after the training, the untrained bottom quartile slightly raised their estimation of their score (by six tenths of a question), but among the trained people the bottom quartile reduced their estimation by 4.3 questions. (In fact the two groups had slightly different performances which I averaged together; so the bottom quartile of the trained group estimated that they got exactly one question right.)

This fourth study, it seems to me, is finally more of a real test of what everyone wants the Dunning-Kruger effect to be about. An average of 0.3 questions right corresponds to roughly to 11 of the 35 people in the bottom quartile getting one question right while the rest got every question wrong. The incompetent people were actually incompetent. Further, they over-estimated their performance by over 1800%. So here, finally, we come to the substance of the quote from John Cleese, right?

Well… maybe. There are two reasons I’m hesitant to say so, though. The first is the fact that these are still all Cornell students, so they are people who are used to being above average and doing well on tests and so forth. Moreover, virtually all of them would have never been outside of academia, so it is very likely that they’ve never encountered a test which was not designed to be passable by most people. If nothing else, it doesn’t reflect well on a teacher if most of his class gets a failing grade. And probably most importantly, the skills necessary to solve these problems are fairly close to the sort of skills that Ivy League undergrads are supposed to have, so this skillset at which they are incompetent being similar to a skillset at which they are presumably competent might well have misled them.

The second reason I’m hesitant to say that this study confirms the John Cleese quote is that the incompetent people estimated that they got 55% of the questions right, not 95% of the questions right. That is to say, incompetent people thought that they were merely competent. They didn’t think that they are experts.

In the conclusion of the paper, Dunning and Kruger talked about some limitations of their study, which I will quote because it’s well written and I want to do them justice.

We do not mean to imply that people are always unaware of their incompetence. We doubt whether many of our readers would dare take on Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one, challenge Eric Clapton with a session of dueling guitars, or enter into a friendly wager on the golf course with Tiger Woods.

They go on to note that in some domains, knowledge is largely the substance of skill, like in grammar, whereas in other places knowledge and skill are not the same thing, like basketball.

They also note that there is a minimum amount of knowledge required to mistake oneself for competent. As the authors say:

Most people have no trouble identifying their inability to translate Slovenian proverbs, reconstruct an 8-cylinder engine, or diagnose acute disseminated encephalomyelitis.

So where does this leave us with regard to the quote from John Cleese? I think that the real issue is not so much about the inability of the incompetent to estimate their ability, but the inability of the incompetent to reconcile new ideas with what they do actually know. Idiots may not know much, but they still know some things. They’re not rocks. When a learned person tells them something, they are prone to reject it not because they think that they already know everything, but because it seems to contradict the few things they are sure of.

There is a complex interplay between intelligence and education—and I’m talking about education, mind, not mere schooling—where intelligence allows one to see distinctions and connections quickly, while education gives one the framework of what things there are that can be distinguished or connected. If a person lacks the one or the other—and especially if they lack both—understanding new things becomes very difficult because it is hard to connect what was said to what is already known, as well as to distinguish it from possible contradictions to what is already known. If the learned, intelligent person isn’t known by reputation to the idiot, the idiot has no way of knowing whether the things said don’t make sense to him because they are nonsense or because they are too much sense, and a little experience of the world is enough to make many if not most people sufficiently cynical to assume the former.

And I think that perhaps the best way to see the difference between this and the Dunning-Kruger effect is by considering the second half of the fourth experiment: the incompetent people learned how to do what they initially couldn’t. That is, after training they became competent. That is not, in general, our experience of idiots.
Until next time, may you hit everything you aim at.

You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

On By Christopher LansdownIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I recently saw the news that the defense attorney / law professor who made the videos Don’t Talk to Cops (part 1, part 2) wrote a book on the subject. It’s called You Have the Right to Remain Innocent, and it’s a short and easy to read book which covers much of the same material, but in greater depth, with updates for recent caselaw, and without the speed-talking.

Since the basic thesis of the book is stated in its title, which is also a reasonably summary of the book’s actionable advice, it is reasonable to ask what is in the book which justifies opening the book to look at its pages. There’s actually a lot.

The book does starts with some caveats, perhaps most notably that he clarifies he’s talking about speaking with the police when they come to you, unsolicited, to ask you questions about the past. It is both a legal requirement and good sense to readily comply with the request to identify yourself and explain what you are doing in the moment, where you currently are. One of his examples is if you are breaking into your own house because you locked yourself out and a policeman asks you what you are doing, do tell him that this is your house and you don’t have your key. He mentions some other cases when you must talk with the police.

The other very notable caveat is that he takes some pains to point out that every member of society owes a great debt to the men and women who serve as police, who take personal risk to do a difficult job that keeps us safe. Throughout the book, he makes it clear that he isn’t talking about bad people, but (in the main) good people in a bad situation, which is the present criminal legal system in the United States. It is a system which sometimes convicts innocent people along with guilty people, and for reasons he makes clear throughout the book, his primary concern is giving innocent people the tools needed to avoid the pitfalls of this dangerous system. Good people make mistakes, and the mistake of a police officer or a prosecutor or a judge can cost an innocent person decades in prison. (He uses more than a few cases where the person convicted was later conclusively proved innocent by DNA evidence (often decades later) to show how wrong things can go for innocent people.)

The book has more than a few interesting insights into problems with the criminal justice system—perhaps most notably being the way that no living person has any idea even how many crimes are defined by the law, let alone what they all are—but I think its greatest value lies in the examination of particular cases where he goes on to show how even very trivial statements, which are true, can become damning evidence in light of other things which a person may not know and has no control over. The case where a man admitted to having dated a woman some time before the crime he was convicted of happened, in the neighborhood where that crime happened, helped to send a man later exonerated by DNA evidence to prison. Coincidences happen, but not all juries believe that they do.

And it is this sort of thing which is the main value of reading the entire book, I think. It is so very easy to slip into the mindset of wanting to give into the urge to cooperate, to be helpful, to be willing to answer any question which is not directly incriminating (and if I’m innocent, how could any question be directly incriminating?) which takes more than a little beating down by seeing over and over again how even minor admissions of completely true and innocent things can be disastrous. The book presents information, but I think equally reading it constitutes training. If one were ever to face a police interview it would be a very stressful situation, and when stressed we tend to forget what we know and fall back on our habitual reactions. Only through training ourselves by seeing many situations we could all too easily be in is it likely that we will remember to do what we should.

The final two chapters of the book, which are much shorter than the first, deal with the specifics of how to go about exercising one’s right to remain innocent in a practical sense. He covers many instances of how people have accidentally incriminated themselves when invoking their fifth amendment right, as well as how people have accidentally failed at refusing to talk to the police and asking for a lawyer. And again, it’s not so much knowing what to do that’s the real benefit of reading this book, but learning what not to do, and why not to do it.

The book is a short, easy read which is well written, and I think valuable for anyone living in America. I found it a valuable read even after watching the videos I linked above, and strongly recommend it.

Who’s Afraid of the Dark

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently read Russell Newquist‘s short story, Who’s Afraid of the Dark. As you may recall, he recently reviewed my novel, Ordinary Superheroes, so in gratitude I made the time to read his short story sooner rather than later (with three small children in the house, I have very little time for leisure reading these days). I’m glad that I did, and I’m really looking forward to reading the stories which this short story serves as a rather cunning introduction to.

I’m really not sure how to review this short story without revealing any of the surprises in it, so let me apologize in advance for this review being a little oblique, but since I’ve already given away that it’s not simply what it seems, let me emphasize that it’s really not what it seems at first: it’s quite a lot more.

The beginning and middle of the story was suspenseful, while the ending of it is both satisfying and promises much larger stories to come. Stories on very interesting subjects.

If you like stories in which people who have a real chance of winning fight monsters, this story is likely to be for you. Mr. Newquist clearly understands two important ingredients in a good story of humanity fighting monsters: (1) this must always take place in a fundamentally good world, that is, one where it is possible, with blood and sweat and tears and sacrifice, to actually achieve something good and (2) the monsters must be genuinely dangerous and scary.

Update: Russell told me that there is a Peter Bishop story in Between the Wall and the Fire, which I just bought.

Why I Cringe When People Criticize Capitalism (in America)

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

Every time I hear a fellow Christian (usually Catholic, often someone with the good sense to be a fan of G.K. Chesterton) criticize capitalism, I cringe, but not for the reason I suspect most of them would expect. Why I cringe will take a little explanation, but it’s rooted in the fact that there are actually two very different things which go by the name capitalism.

The first is a theory proposed by Adam Smith that, to oversimplify and engage in some revisionist history which is not fair to him but which would take too long to go into further, holds that virtue is unreliable: if we can harness vice to do the work of virtue, we can get the same effect much more reliably. Thus if we appeal to men’s self-interest, they will do what they ought with more vigor than if we appealed to their duty and love of their fellow man. Immanuel Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace has a section which may be taken as a summary of this attitude:

The problem of the formation of the state, hard as it may sound, is not insoluble, even for a race of devils, granted that they have intelligence. It may be put thus:—“Given a multitude of rational beings who, in a body, require general laws for their own preservation, but each of whom, as an individual, is secretly inclined to exempt himself from this restraint: how are we to order their affairs and how establish for them a constitution such that, although their private dispositions may be really antagonistic, they may yet so act as a check upon one another, that, in their public relations, the effect is the same as if they had no such evil sentiments.” Such a problem must be capable of solution. For it deals, not with the moral reformation of mankind, but only with the mechanism of nature; and the problem is to learn how this mechanism of nature can be applied to men, in order so to regulate the antagonism of conflicting interests in a people that they may even compel one another to submit to compulsory laws and thus necessarily bring about the state of peace in which laws have force.

Capitalism in this sense was this general problem applied to economics: we need men to work, but all men are lazy. We can try to appeal to men to be better, but it is much simpler and more reliable to show them how hard work will satisfy their greed.

This version of capitalism is a terrible thing, and by treating men as devils has a tendency to degrade men into a race of devils. But there is something important to note about it, which is that it doesn’t really demand much of government or of men. While it appeals to men’s greed, it does not impose a requirement that a craftsman charge an exorbitant price rather than a just price. It does not forbid a man taking a portion of his just profits and giving it to the poor. It tends to degrade men into devils, but it does not produce a form of government which demands that they become devils.

That was left to Marxism, which by its materialism demanded that all men surrender their souls to the state. Marxism is an equally wrong theory of human beings to the Capitalism of the enlightenment, but it demands a form of government which is far less compatible with human virtue. Further, it demands a form of government which is intrinsically incompatible with natural justice—depriving, as it does, all men of the property necessary to fulfill their obligations to their family and to their neighbors. Marxism inherently demands that all to whom it applies becomes a race of devils.

Of course, Marxism was never historically realized in its fullness since as Roger Scruton observed, it takes an infinite amount of force to make people do what is impossible. But enough force was applied to create the approximation of Marxism known as The Soviet Union (though according to a Russian friend of mine who escaped shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed, a more accurate translation would have been “The Unified Union of United Allies”). This global superpower which was (at least apparently) bent on conquering the world in the name of Marx—well, in the name of Lenin, or communism, or The People; OK, at least bent on conquering the world—and to a marxist, who doesn’t really believe in personal autonomy and thus doesn’t believe in personal virtue, everyone else looks like a Capitalist, in the original sense of the word, since anything which is individual must inherently be greed.

So they called American capitalists. But if the devils in hell spit some criticism at you, it is only natural to take it as a compliment, and partly because of this and partly for lack of a better term, Americans started calling themselves capitalists. If the people with the overpopulated death camps for political prisoners in the frozen wastelands of Siberia despise us for being capitalists, then being a capitalist must be a pretty good thing. But in embracing the term capitalist, people were not thinking of Adam Smith’s economic theory or the problem Kant wrestled with in how to get a race of devils to cooperate, they were thinking of what they were and just using the name capitalist to describe that.

And here’s where we come to the part that makes me cringe when I hear fellow Christians complain about Capitalism. The United States of America has had many sins, but it never been capitalist in the philosophical sense. Much of what became The United States was founded as religious colonies, though to be sure there were economic colonies as well. But the economic colonies, which had all of the vices that unsupervised people tend to, were still composed of religious people who at least acknowledged the primacy of virtue over vice in theory. And for all the problems with protestantism, the famous “Protestant Work Ethic” was the diametric opposite of philosophical capitalism. The whole idea of the protestant work ethic is that men should work far beyond what is needed, because it is virtue and because idleness is dangerous. Perhaps it was always more of a theory than a practice, but even so it was not the opposite theory of capitalism that men should work to satisfy their greed.

For perhaps the first century after the founding of The United States, it was a frontier nation in which people expanded and moved around with fairly low population densities. It takes time to set up governments and small groups of people can resolve their own differences well enough, most of the time, so the paucity of government as we’re used to it today (and though in a different form people would have been used to it in Europe in the middle ages) was largely due to the historical accident of low population densities, and not to any sort of philosophical ideal that greed is the highest good, making government practically unnecessary except for contract enforcement.

And while it is true that this environment gave birth to the robber barons who made a great deal of money treating their fellow men like dirt, it also gave rise to trust busters and government regulation designed to curb the vices of men who did not feel like practicing even minimal virtue to their fellow man. Laws and regulations take time to develop, especially in a land without computers and cell phone cameras; before the advent of radio it took more than a little time to convince many people of some proposition because the skilled orators could only do the convincing one crowd at a time.

Moreover, the United States has never had a government free from corruption, but powerful men buying off politicians was not what the United States was supposed to be; all things in this fallen world are degenerate versions of themselves. Slowness to act on common principles in a fallen world does not mean that a people does not hold those principles, only that hard things like overcoming corruption are difficult and time consuming to do.

But throughout the history of the United States, if you walked up the average citizen and asked him, “ought we, as a people, to encourage men to be honest, hard working, and generous, or ought we to show each man that at least the first two are often in his self-interest and then encourage him to then be as selfish and greedy as possible?” you would have had to ask a great many people indeed to come across someone who would cheerfully give you the second answer. Being willing to give that second answer is largely a modern degeneracy of secularists who know only enough economics nor history to be dangerous, and for the most part think that you’re asking whether the government should micro-manage people’s lives to force them to be honest, hard working, and generous. Americans have many vices, but the least reliable way possible to find out what they are is to ask us.

I will grant that philosophical capitalism is also, to some degree, what is proposed by advertising. Indulge yourself! It’s sinfully delicious! You’re worth it! You deserve it! Everything is about making you happy!

I think that this may be why I cringe the most when my fellow Christians complain about our capitalist society; they should have learned by now not to believe everything they see on television.

Rambling about Online Discourse

On By Christopher LansdownIn RamblesLeave a comment

I used to have a much better opinion of atheists before I talked with so many of them on twitter and youtube. And to clarify, it’s not that my opinion of atheists in general has gone down, only that I’ve come to realize that the atheists I had been in contact with before were a sub-set of all atheists. I had lucked into specially good ones. There are honest, decent people who don’t believe in God, but I’m coming to believe that they’re the exception, not the rule. (To be clear, each person must be dealt with as an individual, and never as merely an exemplar of a group, so whenever you come across an atheist, you must deal with him as him, and not as “an atheist”.) The longer I spend online, the more I come to believe that honest people may be quite atypical among atheists.

It does get tiring being insulted by dimwits on the internet, of course—and the average twitter/youtube atheist seems like they’d have trouble passing high school, at least if they had to take all honors classes, so poor is their grasp of entirely secular subjects—but I really don’t think that’s why my opinion is shifting. It’s really that the average twitter/youtube atheist says things which they clearly don’t mean and claims to believe things which they clearly don’t believe, and then takes advantage of the standard rules of politeness in order to try to force others into being complicit in their… if not exactly lies, then at least their reckless and culpable disregard for the truth.

Take for example the trope about “atheism is merely a lack of belief” which actually means, “I’m going to act like there’s no God even though I don’t believe that’s the case”. One could make an argument for probabilistic action—that when we don’t know something we have to operate on our best guesses—but even if that’s the route one went (and lack-atheists rarely argue this explicitly) one still has to make the positive case that the probability for action is above the threshold, or one is acting purely irrationally. Which is, in fact, what lack-atheists usually claim if you push them to be explicit. They don’t think, they just act; reason doesn’t actually work anyway; we’re just the most clever of the beasts who crawl the earth; etc. Which, OK, fine, but if one abjures all truth claims, one shouldn’t go on to make truth claims. But they almost always do, and expect to be taken seriously.

And that’s the part that’s really so frustrating. It’s that they demand that one take part in their lies—what else should we call truth claims they make but don’t believe? And then sometimes they’re even more explicit. I met one fellow who claimed that Jesus said we have to take the bible literally. And here’s the thing: there is no benefit of the doubt to give the guy. If he was beaten in the head with a tire iron for two hours by a team of professional strong-men, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to think that Jesus said, “you have to take the bible literally”. Because here’s the thing about literal interpretations: they’re literal. If Jesus said you have to take everything in the bible literally, it would include what he said, which to literally mean “you must take everything in the bible literally” would have to be phrased, “you must take everything in the bible literally”. Alternate phrasings would of course be fine, “you must interpret everything in the bible literally” etc. But it would have to be clear and unambiguous and require no interpretation of any kind in order to be an instruction to take it (and everything else in the bible) as clear and unambiguous and requiring no interpretation. Even the most cursory familiarity with the bible—and if one is making claims that a book says something, one has a responsibility to find out that it said it—is sufficient to know that there are no such passages. There was literally no honest way this guy could have claimed what he did. And it seems very likely that he was lying as boldly as he did because it is rude to call him a liar. But when someone unambiguously is a liar, what else are we supposed to do? It coarsens discourse, but to treat a liar like he’s honest is itself dishonest. As Tycho from Penny Arcade said:

You aren’t supposed to call people liars; it’s one of those things you aren’t supposed to do.  It seems like a rule cooked up by liars, frankly.  But what if a person dissembles madly, and writhes rhetorically, in the service of a goal oblique to their stated aims?  I see no reason to invent another word.

It’s really normal for Christians to go out of their way to try to make out atheists as being merely misguided, the victims of bad Christians who didn’t teach them well, etc. and I certainly get the impulse. There are some people who are like that. But at the end of the day, when somebody professes something obviously false like that we don’t have free will, or that reason doesn’t work, or whatever it is, they’re still human and still have a duty to actually investigate the world and try to be right about it and so the best case that you can make out for someone saying things like this then ignoring them and moving on is that they’re doing no better a job of being honest than you could expect of them given how badly they were raised. Which may be true, but so what? We’re not their judges. It’s not our job to judge whether they’re culpable for their lies; it’s first to not be complicit and second if possible to help them to stop lying. And I don’t think that failing at step 1 is likely to help succeed at step 2.