July 2009
25 posts
1 tag
The evil god argument (part 2)
Yesterday I started talking about the evil god argument. We left off trying to evaluate how reasonable belief in god was given the amount of evil in the world. So the atheist and theist can go back and forth on the value of free will and the amount of suffering caused by natural disasters. The evil god argument hopes to perform an aikido-like switch on the theist’s theodicies —...
June 2009
34 posts
Multiple intelligences?
Christopher Ferguson has an article in The Chronicle called Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius. The article claims that the theory of multiple intelligences (logical, social, musical, etc.) is mostly wrong and has persisted more for its egalitarian appeal than anything else. While the theory has gained a lot of traction in current thinking on education and children, “the eight...
Two articles on reading
I recently read two interesting articles about reading in the age of the internet. The first, entitled Why Teenagers Read Better Than You argues that - despite all you’ve heard about ‘kids these days’ who can’t read anything longer than a text message - Young Adult book sales are excelling, even in the current recession. The reason, according to the article, is that...
A dollar a day keeps pregnancy at bay?
A group in North Carolina is paying teenage girls one dollar every day to not get pregnant. Interestingly, “… nearly 100 percent of the girls who finish the program have gone on to graduate college.” Obviously, there’s some selection bias here, but I do think the program sounds like a good idea - the dollar incentive, while small, gives the organization access to teenagers,...
Nike+ and data-gathering
Wired has an article by Mark McClusky on Nike+, the smart combination of iPods and Nike that helps runners amass data on their running regimens. The article includes good anecdotal evidence about the ways in which data tracking has encouraged and improved running for those who did it, chalking it up to a mixture between the Hawthorne effect and the fact that it’s cool and novel to use your...
Becker-Posner on the end of newspapers
Last week, Becker and Posner bloggedabout the demise of newspapers. Both agree that newspapers are in trouble. Posner also argues that the recession may speed up the decline because cost-saving switches made by consumers while money is tight may persist even after the recession is over.
While Becker appears to mostly agree with my take on the issue, Posner is more worried about the ability of...
1 tag
The evil god argument (part 1)
After two science posts in a row, I thought a cool philosophy argument would be a nice way to close out the week. To that end I’ll offer a sketch of the evil god argument today and tomorrow.
Today I offer some background: the problem of evil is a challenge to the existence of the Judeo-Christian god that works something like the following:
An omniscient omnipotent and maximally good...
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Time perception
Directly from the internet home of the third culture, a piece on new research on how the brain perceives time.
According to Eagleman, fitting things together is trickier than you might think. One difficulty for our brain is that different brain systems work at different speeds; vision is slower than hearing, so runners hear the bang of a gun before they see its flash. There is variation within...
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Finding the next terrestrial home for humanity
Seed magazine had a very interesting profile of two groups of people looking for earth-like planets in nearby solar systems. It’s a bit surprising how difficult it is to find planets; intuitively it seems like you should just have to look in the right direction.
The analogy they use to illustrate the difficulty of finding small rocky planets is to say it’s like detecting a bacterium...
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The Kenyan internet
I recently said I wasn’t too worried about the unwired portion of the population. One of my reasons was that internet access was fairly widely available and spreading rapidly. A recent economist article offers a good datum in support of that notion: Kenya is getting three new fiber-optic cables within the next few months.
According to the economist, the cables should speed up parts of...
Motorcycles and Modernity
I’ve read a few reviews of a book by Matthew Crawford called Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the value of Work. The book, which is a memoir by a philosophy Ph.D turned motorcycle mechanic, invited comparisons with the much older Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, which I found good but sometimes preachy. Both deal with the modern anxiety and...
Matt Mullenweg
I stumbled across an interesting blog post by Matt Mullenweg, the guy behind WordPress. In addition to just being a good look into an intriguing, successful life, I think it offers a sensible take on using technology to enhance productivity (and life) and limiting where it doesn’t. Like others, he tracks his time spent on different tasks to identify unnecessary time sucks. Relatedly, he also...
Federer and Nadal
I just recently read two long profiles on Robger Federer and Rafael Nadal. The first, on Federer, is a 2006 article in PLAY Magazine written by David Foster Wallace. It’s written in typical DFW style with long, frenetic sentences and 17 footnotes.The second is an article from today’s New York Times on Nadal. I’ve never much watched tennis, but the one-one-one style makes the...
The Economist and the future of news
The Atlantic has a great piece on the efforts of Newsweek and time to remake themselves as higher brow in order to slow their declines. In the article, Michael Hirschorn contrasts these two weeklies, which have seen serious reductions in circulation, with The Economist which is “not only surviving, but thriving/”
Hirschorn argues that The Economist - though is writing is sometimes...
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What is the most important year ever?
The Economist’s sister magazine Intelligent life is building one of the most useless but also most engaging “best of” lists: What was the most important year of all time?
Some of their picks are obvious:
5BC — approximate birth of Jesus, inspiration for one of the world’s most powerful and enduring institutions
1439 — Gutenberg invents the printing...
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Bitter? Get better!
There’s a conversation happening about the status of PTED — post-traumatic embitterment disorder — and its inclusion in the next DSM. It’s not currently recognized as a disorder, but some psychiatrists think it is deeply pervasive and deeply pernicious. Here’s the language used to describe PTED:
Instead of dealing with the loss with the help of family and friends,...
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NASA and the form of a twitter stream
Social media savvy companies take note: a twitter stream is best written in the first person. This is especially true when the author is an inanimate object.
Consider the LCROSS_NASA account — it’s a record of a NASA mission to investigate the presence of water ice near one of the moon’s poles written as the very excited rocket itself.
Ah, my last night on Earth. Twilight...
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Courts are bad at getting the truth
In a previous post I told you why memories of our experiences are coarse when it comes to very specific facts. We store very little, tamper with our memories to create a coherent narrative and just plain guess to fill in the blanks. There are an embarrassment of other reasons to be skeptical about eyewitness testimony.
But courts are hardly better off when it comes to knowing the truth about...
A college admissions fix?
Every year newspapers like the New York Times have long features on the stresses of applying to college. They feature exasperated mothers and stressed out high school seniors with plenty of “Can you believed he was rejected by ALL of those schools???” stories. These features are topical every year, in part, because admissions rates for most elite colleges have fallen yearly,...
What do we know about Chinese Culture?
According to a piece in Wilson Quarterly - not much. While Americans have very clear stereotypes in mind about Chinese cultural attitudes (they adhere to a role-based ethic, are nationalistic, and are more communally focused), a recent study claism that many of these stereotypes do not hold water. According to the article:
Hypernationalism? Only 26 percent of Chinese said they were proud of...
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Windows is a discriminating product
Jason Hiner over at ZDNet penned an open letter asking for a single version of Windows 7. Vista was famous for its many versions and Windows 7 looks to be the about the same.
In his letter, he argues that a single version of windows would be better for consumers and for Microsoft; he’s wrong on both counts. Microsoft should probably be clearer in their marketing and invest more in the...
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Investigating nothing
Some scientists take nothing really seriously. A note on TierneyLab discusses a panel trying to investigate the classical philosophical question: Why is there something rather than nothing.
Is this another area like physics or philosophy of mind where science can steal away the authoritative answers? I’m skeptical. Even if scientists can demonstrate that a vacuum ultimately yields matter,...
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Internet inequality
Some technologies, globalization, deunionization, superstar effects and pay-for-performance have all contributed to rising income inequality. They have also contributed enormously to greater global prosperity. The internet is being discussed as an example of a technology that’s probably welfare enhancing but inequality increasing.
Two points I want to make about internet access. First, the...
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Evolution economizes
People with confabulatory hypermnesia, also called severe false memory syndrome, make up plausible answers to thinks they couldn’t possibly know. From a post in neurophilosophy:
“Who won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980?” he replied “Fernandel”; when asked what he had for dinner on Tuesday two weeks ago, he answered “Steak with french...
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More on entry fiction
One sentiment I found strange while researching entry fiction and immigration law was the notion that noncitizens waiting at the border to enter the United States have almost no Constitutional rights.
The problem of entry fiction was usually phrased as: “parolees who enter the United States are treated as if they’re still on Ellis Island, so that means they can be indefinitely...
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2 Interesting articles I've read about...
The first is an NYT profile of Jim Collins, a management and business writer. In addition to being a character in general, Collins offers a few interesting points from a productivity standpoint. First, he meticulously tracks data about his life. He does so both on a micro scale (a rolling average of how much he sleeps), and on a macro scale (making sure that he’s spending the right...
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Some progress?
I’ve complained about the US education system and teachers unions here and here, but this article in the New York Times gives me some reason to be optimistic. A charter school is opening in Washington Heights this fall that is paying teachers $125,000 to teach at their school.
In addition to attracting star teachers (Ivy League grads with good teaching experience, as well as the Lakers...
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The guardian on atheism and agnosticism
Is agnosticism anything more than a polite, or cowardly veil around atheism? That’s the question the guardian posed for their “comment is free” feature this week. A few of the respondents had some
Jonathan West offers some definitions and urges us to just let people self identify. I think that’s a reasonable way to live, but it’s unsatisfactory to people for whom...
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Guantanamo-like indefinite detention is hardly new
I just finished a final paper on a legal doctrine called “entry fiction,” which concerns the rights of aliens within the United States. Originally, the doctrine existed to allow us to treat aliens at the border or on Ellis Island as if they haven’t yet entered the country. The distinction is important because Due Process applies to all persons within the United States (even...
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Dyson on climate again
I posted about Freeman Dyson’s climate skepticism a few days back. In an interview published yesterday he discusses the Times profile of him and his attitudes. He seems weary of the conversation. He repeats several times that he isn’t an expert but sticks to his claim that our climate models aren’t predictive:
the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small...
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Champerty at work
Fortune has a quick piece on a group of funds that invests in lawsuits. This practice, known as champerty, has a long legal history. Champerty has been variously banned or restricted on grounds of fairness and efficiency. Why might champerty be worth restricting?
One concern is that unsophisticated plaintiffs will sell their suits for less than they’re worth to unscrupulous champertors....
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The value of Christianity
The New Criterion a review of “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies” by David Hart. The book focuses on the historical claims of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens — Hart intends to defend Christianity’s moral track record from, among other things, accusations of hostility to science and late opposition to slavery or sexual inequality.
One...
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FP magazine on child soldiers
Foreign Policy is one of the best magazines out there — at least up there with the Economist and New Scientist. It’s great when it comes to knowing facts about the state of the world. Maybe it’s not so great on big ideas but at least it tries.
Here’s the most recent example: FP gives six things you might not know about child soldiers. Some interesting facts are:
Most...
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Innovative cities and the new responsiveness
San Francisco will now accept complaints about potholes via twitter. Combined with twitpic, I think it could be a useful tool. It’s things like this that make me less worried about the fall of newspapers. Of course not every city is as wealthy as SF, and this may or may not wind up being a useful tool for citizens. We’ll have to see if complaints floated this way do get dealt with and...