Almost certainly anyone who has their blogs pumped through Planet Atheism must know that direct engagement with theists is both necessary and a nearly impossible task at the same time. I have had arguments/discussions with many people over the years on the topic of theistic-belief and I can say that, as least when addressed directly, it has always been futile – the participants in the discussion do not unseat their beliefs in the light of reason and evidence. I can say that for the first few years this was a disheartening outcome, personally very frustrating and, in some cases, frightening. As Sam Harris has pointed out people with theistic belief structures in their head can be downright dangerous, I was well aware of this problem long before Mr. Harris set out to write books on the subject. Prior to the Internet I was an isolated individual, quite literally fighting a lone “battle” on this issue as I can honestly state that my concerns on this subject were not shared by family and friends. Fortunately, the Internet and the Web did take off and I now have access to and can share ideas with many like-minded people, but still, even the combined effort of many atheists demolishing every aspect of theistic-belief structures is not enough to directly unseat such belief structures – like smoking: the evidence for the harm caused by smoking has been with us for decades but people still take up the habit.
Although my failure to directly change people’s minds on the subject of theistic belief can be a source of personal frustration, the basis of this frustration: people not changing their beliefs in light of evidence, is a well-researched area of psychology and sociology. It turns out that, if we are Bayesian in nature, we’re not very good Bayesians. I tend to agree with Robin Hanson on this particular subject which is to say that most people choose their belief structures based on group membership signaling rather than skeptical, independent, and critical thought and analysis of evidence. This particular view comes across as a more plausible, and simpler (Occam’s Razor) explanation: being a social animals we will prize “social points” over “intellectual points” by default, and only occasionally re-align our thinking if we perceive that such re-alignment will achieve more “social points”.
So then, if “direct” engagement is almost certainly futile (as all of the “New Atheists” [blech, what a nonsensical title] have pointed out) why do it? Predominantly, we need to have the “discussion” to create a legacy of literature for new generations to work with. We live in an unprecedented time where the rational analysis, taming, and ultimate cure of theistic beliefs can be had comprehensively, but unlike the Polio vaccine the agent of curing humankind of the virus of theism are other humans discussing the topic directly, but the desired outcome is typically indirect. There may be some evidence that this new “public openness” of atheism is causing those with honest doubt about theistic belief to actually embrace that doubt rather than suppress it and go along with the overwhelming theistic population (in the United States), but the real win is in seeding future generations with the tools to judge theistic belief skeptically, rationally and empirically.
My brother-in-law pointed me to this piece, very nice.
The piece is very enjoyable, and very familiar to any atheist. The typical break down is that you are either arguing with a wall (the theist), or someone with A.D.D. who cannot keep his arguments straight (the agnostic).
Tags: Atheism/Secular Issues, Funny, Why?
Reports continue to pour in from across this nation of embarrassing and despicable behavior with regard to the President’s address to school children tomorrow. Already the Ridgewood school system has decided to throw its support behind the idea that an as-yet-to-be-heard speech is controversial, I presume, much like the Brookfield, WI school system. Today we will get the chance to read the actual speech as it will be posted on the White House web site.
The controversy surrounding this speech has nothing to do with the speech of course. It has to do with the unjustified anger of a number of Americans. That anger is both irrational and not based on the facts. While you do not have to agree with Obama, or even like him, attempting to effectively silence the President of the United States through intimidation of schools, school systems, concerned citizens trying to actually help by contributing their ideas at town halls, or otherwise mindlessly and wrongly bullying people is fundamentally not acceptable.
UPDATE: The president’s speech is now online. It is short and sweet – no surprises, no hidden agendas, no code words to turn our children into mindless socialist/Marxist drones following Obama’s every command.
UPDATE 2: Just had to link.
Tags: Obama, Public Schools, Ridgewood, wrong
Today parents of students in the Ridgewood public school system received emails detailing how our schools are going to willfully contribute to the ridiculous ”controversy” surrounding a speech President Obama is going to make to students and parents this coming Tuesday. By willful contribution I mean the following:
- The schools have agreed to recognize this speech as “controversial”.
- Some schools have elected to not have the speech shown in schools while others will “record, and preview” the speech then decide later “what portions are appropriate to what grade levels”. (I.E. they will censor the content of the speech)
Firstly, this entire “controversy” is sheer lunacy and any rational person who willingly or unwillingly participates in bolstering the claim that a speech that has not even been made yet is “controversial” ought to be ashamed of themselves. Secondly, given all that is known about what the speech is likely to contain (also here) what is the supporting evidence that there is anything to be remotely concerned about?
FACT: The speech has not yet been given. Therefore, the “controversy” is not about the speech – the contents of the speech will be made available on Monday – so what could possibly be the problem?
Given that the justification “controversy” is utterly without merit, how do you think the Ridgwood school system should deal with this event? By quite literally shunning a speech by the President? Censoring his speech? If President Obama has any skills at all he’s a damned good orator, and there are a lot of batshit crazy stupid people who do not like President Obama as a person and will attack him any way they can. Getting people to not listen to his speeches through intimidation would be one pretty effective way to help erode support for our (duly elected) President. The Ridgwood public school system has chosen to either give in to this intimidation, or worse, actively support the notion that there is indeed a “controversy” of merit.
Is this what we want to teach our kids? That intimidation is an acceptable way to influence public discourse? That in a time of great national stress we should pre-judge more and listen less? That the proper and appropriate way to engage collectively difficult issues is to disengage from the debate?
President Obama’s speech on Tuesday will not be about health insurance, it will be about the important opportunities that exist with the effective education of our youth, and how parents, teachers and students can work together to maximize the potential of all students through education. Why is it that the Ridgewood school system seems to be such a willing partner in promoting and bolstering this ignorant and unjustified “controversy” as opposed to finding meaningful, direct and creative ways to engage students with the President I do not know. What I do know is that I am deeply disappointed in the way the school system has handled a situation that, to my thinking, literally requires no handling at all: there is no controversy.
Tags: Controversy, Obama, Public Schools, Ridgewood
I originally envisioned writing a large post regarding some of my thoughts on the implications of Jonathan Heidt’s research, instead I’ve opted for a series of smaller pieces that may make for interesting conversation on their own. For reference/background you can check out the following:
Some videos of Jon Haidt:
A couple rather fantastic essays on EDGE:
So, yesterday I went to a Confirmation party for a relative of mine, and as typical for one of these occasions we gave a card with money. Of course, getting a “confirmation card” is a bit of a trip, I hunted around for the least religious card I could find, but the event, a “confirmation”, is an explicitly religious event, a little hard to dodge getting cards with all sorts of “lordly” references. Clearly, this was a bit of bad planning on my part. If I were more on the ball I could have made up my own card (as opposed to a generic “congratulations” card) that said something nice without endorsing religious nuttery.
The idea of making atheist friendly cards, especially for an event like a confirmation was mentally very entertaining yesterday with thoughts such as the following:
So, your parents have sought fit to continue the brain-washing they began at your birth. Pity, I offer my council to re-acquaint yourself with the greater wonder of reality when you are ready. In the mean time I offer my condolences for your continued condition.
And all sorts of variations on this theme. Yes, I admit that this clearly comes across as arrogant, but it’s more amusing that way. Anyhow, note to self: plan ahead next time.
Recently, I had gotten together with a bunch of friends from my former company Digital Railroad (DRR). DRR had such a great team – such squandered opportunity. Among the numerous subjects brought up were estimates about how accurate my predictions were about what DRR ought to do overall, and in particular what important product features DRR should build and what they should look like. Now granted, the former DRR folks were out to have a good time and were relaxing over a few drinks so I listened to their flattery and rather generous estimates of my “DRR must do so-and-so …” dictums as being 80% (or more) on the mark. A few of these folks have remained in the “business” of professional on-line photo archives and basically have seen first-hand a number of “my ideas” become realized by other companies. At one point I was asked point-blank: did that reality upset me? My answer was a direct and succinct “no, not in the slightest.” Sure, I would love to have been the one to build a lot of cool stuff we didn’t get to do at DRR, but I’m not doing that, and I’m glad that even though I didn’t have a hand in it, what was blatantly obvious to me was at least as blatantly obvious to some other team of engineers and now professional photographers are able to use tools that remained mere twinkles in my eye at DRR.
But, what was unrealized by DRR is not the main subject of this post, rather the phenomenon of how/why people, in retrospect (and even when DRR was still in business), seem to attribute such a high accuracy to my claims as to what, why, and how DRR should do things. The reality is that if 50% of my claims turned out to be the things DRR ought to do (and are now being realized by other companies) I would be astonished. Furthermore, my former colleagues grossly underestimate their roles in “my” output of ideas. I recall vividly being wrong about my (literally) ideas most of the time. But, as it was discovered in the Biosphere 2 experiment that trees need wind to grow strong, I refined and iterated my ideas with input and direction from the very same colleagues that attributed those ideas to me. Many of my “original” ideas were merely direct extensions of what was already there in the photographic data we had available to us. For instance: all embedded metadata in photographs should be imported into our system and made available for viewing, editing, and searching is not really an Earth-shattering idea, such data is already in the file it only makes sense to make it available within a system like DRR, but we didn’t, we always worked with a very restrictive subset of the data. Many other ideas I expressed about UI, and work-flow, and our cart and licensing were distilled results of iterated conversations I had with my various colleagues around me, they did not spring forth from my head in their final form. The staff of DRR had (have) remarkable talent, that talent was exploited by me to help congeal succinct statements about what DRR ought to do through an iterative process; these ideas that seemed to have come from me were mostly refined and focused version of their own ideas. Somehow though, those ideas have been attributed to me. To my fellow DRR alumni, the next time you are sitting quietly at home or wherever and are reflecting on things DRR, tune in to memories of your own thoughts and the chatter in the office, realize that it was us, together that came up with great, unrealized, ideas not me. For crying out loud: give credit where credit is due, and you all are due a lot more credit than I am for those “ideas” you attribute to me.
So, what explains the phenomena of attribution to me? Even at DRR I was aware of some of the phenomena I described above, so the recent reiterations are not unexpected. I think that such an attribution comes down to personality and timing. For better or worse most who know me know that I’m brutally honest and often startlingly direct, I have no future in politics. I was just as tuned into the problems and stresses that flowed through the DRR aether as anyone else. When I picked up on chatter that related to something I could possibly do something about I got proactive (in my meandering sort of way) to talk to people about problems with our product. I could and did talk a lot, it is often said that talkers are not good listeners, perhaps we should have a talk ;-). I would listen keenly to what people would have to say. My friend Oren says that the best products spawn from the “that’s fucked up” mentality, so I listened to what people thought was fucked up about our product. I would often throw in my ideas and have them shot down, but in the process I learned something. Eventually, a reasonable idea would form that would clearly address a particular problem. Now, mind you, my “investigations” of this sort were not tied to any of our release schedules, often I would be directly digging into what I perceived as real issues with our product as opposed to the crap-o-rama featuritis product release circus that DRR got into (at the expense of fixing core problems with our site). After I had refined a solution to a particularly vexing problem that I thought got solved as a collaboration I did the blatantly obvious thing: I told people about it. Heaven knows that a number of my friends DRR were burdened by email tomes describing in painfully bad language sweeping plans to solve X or Y at considerable detail and length. Typically, like earthquakes, these emails arrived unannounced. These emails were not the typical “I’m fed up” kind of manifestos that often come from engineering types, but detailed designs on a fix and proposals on how we could accomplish the task. Some of these ideas we did like the DRR search system, and eventually the new image delivery system, most never got off the drawing board.
What I think happened at DRR (which was not unique in my history), is this:
- “Big” ideas would be injected by me into the aether of DRR in a way that was not synchronous to other activities at DRR, therefore, the ideas stood out with stark relief against the normal background activity. But everyone at DRR should know that those ideas were merely a collection, refinement and amplification of their own ideas put through preliminary engineering and design phases to provide a way for the engineering team to discuss them.
- Many people are uncomfortable with speaking plainly or taking risks with putting out ideas solo, I have neither fear nor discomfort in doing that. Many of the ideas that DRR scheduled were the result of featuritis and were pushed though with insufficient time or incorrect processes to develop ideas well. I took a slower route and bounced ideas back and forth until I got a square-ish peg to actually fit the squarish hole.
- I didn’t tolerate bad ideas, and would fight them tooth-and-nail, even if we were well into a feature design cycle. In my book momentum behind a clearly bad idea is not justification to move forward with such ideas. DRR’s design process would introduce so many “corner cases” and “edge cases” as to produce a tragic comedy. At one point I forbid the use of the phrases “corner case” and “edge case”, you simply fucked up, back to the drawing boards. I explained to people that thinking in terms of percentages of users who would encounter an “edge case” is the absolute wrong metric: with any sufficiently large population of users some significant minority of users are suffering because of your mistake. Solve actual problems, not convenient subsets of them.
- Finally, I explained to many people I was close to at DRR: it’s just a job, if I get fired, I get fired, I don’t care, but for as long as I’m there I plan to care about using my time in a way that I can look back and be happy with my accomplishments.
The confluence of the above points created a number of perceptions of me, among them: crazy, reckless, and bold. I would say that most people who worked in the New York office learned to see past the crazy and reckless aspects because bold certainly is closer to what I was looking for. Eventually those people realized that I really am just trying to help make what we were building better and trying to find ways, with their help to do it, but they also knew explicitly that I needed their help to get it done, I could not do it on my own: you could work with the cantankerous old fat guy. I think that most of the Seattle office basically hated me, which is a shame for the feeling was not mutual. The main reason I think is that I has no direct way to get past the crazy and reckless image with them so I came off as an asshole. Perhaps someday that gap can be bridged. But the other side-effect of the above points is that I came across as a distinct personality associated with ideas so undue attributions have been made and are still made to me. The reality of course is I has the singular pleasure of working with a number of fantastic people who were the true source and inspiration for ideas I thought were important to DRR’s customers, all I did was to try to do what I thought I could do best to get those ideas realized: open my big mouth (or write an email) and make some noise.
It has been a while since I updated the blog, apologies to all you loyal readers: been doing some Merb hacking on the site, and finally got a version of my resume up, now I’m sure to get a job! ;-)
Anywho, I do have some essays/entries lined up:
- A Merb tutorial/HOW-TO — No joke I got a hit from a Google search (Woo hoo! Google knows I exist!) looking for a Merb tutorial, and I have none! I can’t let that stand!
- An essay on Web development and ideas on how to build big
- I have been following a lot of the work that Jonathan Haidt has been publishing recently, and looking at the criticisms that Sam Harris has been making of that work. I have a number of opinions to share in this subject. In the mean time check out Jon Haidt’s web site and the Moral Foundations site, really good stuff.
Sorry for the radio silence. Looking for work that doesn’t suck, and hacking code for this site take their toll on my attentions. Fun on its way!
Tags: Ethics/Morality, Hacking, HOW-TO, Maintenance, Software Engineering/Programming
|
