Two steps to freeing yourself from operating system zealotry

First, repeat the following mantra to yourself until you really, really believe it:

Other people's needs, habits, and experiences with software differ dramatically from mine, and are just as legitimate.

Your platform of choice may seem to satisfy your needs exactly. It may ring every single chime in the halls of your heart. But if you sincerely believe that every user who wants something different is simply mistaken, then you're presuming to a knowledge that you do not possess: namely, the knowledge of how every other user behaves.

Second, pay close attention when you're using your preferred computing device, and make a mental note every time you end up staring, slack-jawed or pissed-off or confused, while your computer does something other than what you just asked it to do. (This includes while you're waiting for some indicator to stop spinning, or when you need to stab the "Cancel" or "Back" button.) If you believe that this never happens to you, then you are not paying close enough attention, and in fact you should be frightened, because you have become so habituated to your platform of choice that you've learned to automatically edit these moments out of your consciousness. The inescapable truth is that all computing platforms suck in different ways, including yours. And until you realize this, you will not have achieved enlightenment.

Once these two conclusions sink in, you will shortly see that all OS zealotry is the futile worship of invented gods — cruel, greedy, capricious, and temporary gods to boot. Arguing with people on the Internet about the superiority of your computing bauble will seem to you like a species of insanity.

But who am I kidding. Most OS zealots are fractally wrong and it's a fool's errand to dissuade them. But maybe you, dear reader, can be saved...

SFO breakfast receipts (en route to EWR)

Spot the funny.

Fundamentalist chat room highlights

I suspect this is making the rounds, but I was infected via C. Stross, so here it is. Many laugh-out-loud moments.* And some depressingly tragic moments as well.** A small taste:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

I want to say something witty about the last two sentences in this quote, but its comic timing is so exquisite that I cannot add anything to it.

As with many of the quotes, one wonders whether the person writing it is actually satirizing fundamentalism. But part of the fun, I suppose, is observing that fundamentalist speech and satire of fundamentalist speech are indistinguishable.

* I mean literally. Not: "It actually only made me sort of smile silently but I will describe this activity as 'laughing out loud' for dramatic effect". I am sitting here on this Sunday morning making loud noises of hilarity. Down with the metaphorical "lol".

** Of course, the tragedy and humor often go together.

Theodicy and its opposite

Devout people often attempt to address the Problem of Evil, or specific instances thereof (e.g., the manifold cases of cruel and inhuman violence advocated in the Bible) by claiming that their god's actions are above human judgment. Since a god's actions are above human judgment, our judgment that these actions are evil holds no weight: the actions are just and good, even though our judgment declares them not to be.

Obviously, this belief is socially toxic. Once convinced that your own moral judgment can be overridden by a higher authority --- not through moral persuasion, but by simple invocation of the fact that the speaker possesses greater authority than you do --- it becomes all too easy for you to defer similarly to worldly figures in positions of authority.

But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing to point out, for the record, a flaw in this argument that has always seemed utterly obvious to me, but which I rarely (never?) hear said explicitly, and which doesn't seem to occur to most religious believers.

Let us grant, for the sake of argument only, that all the humanly observable events in the Bible occurred in reality, rather than in fiction. How would you know that your god had better moral judgment than you do?

More concretely: How do you know that your god is not, in fact, a demonic superpowerful alien who gets off on tormenting and deceiving people, but who merely claims to be good?

Once you contemplate this question for about ten seconds, it becomes obvious that the only way to distinguish between a righteous deity and a malevolent, deceitful one is to exercise one's own intellect and moral judgment. If tomorrow, a mysterious, brilliantly shining light appeared over Manhattan, performed a number of miracles, and then ordered everyone, in a profoundly booming voice, to abduct and rape children, then I dearly hope that you would not follow its orders, because you would know that you were right and the shining light was wrong.

In short, no being can demand that you defer to its moral judgment. In fact, once you become an adult, you are morally obligated to refuse to defer to someone else's moral judgment. If you permitted yourself to defer to someone else's moral judgment, it would also be possible for you to be deceived into deferring to an evil or amoral being, which is unacceptable.

Here are some bogus counterarguments, and their refutations:

"God created the universe, and therefore has authority to make moral judgments within it."

First of all, the denizens of the Bible have only God's word that he is responsible for creating the universe. This could be a lie. Second, the power to create something does not imply higher moral judgment with respect to that creation, as the many children of abusive parents know. God could be an abusive parent. The only way to distinguish between an abusive creator and a benevolent one is to exercise one's own moral judgment.

"God is all-powerful, and has the authority to make moral judgments."

This is just a generalization of the previous point. First, it could be a lie that God is all-powerful. Second, being all-powerful (or "X-powerful" for any X) indicates only that God possesses an ability that you do not. It says nothing about whether that power is being exercised for good or evil, which one can only determine by exercising one's own moral judgment.

"God is all-powerful. Formally, for all X, God can do X. Instantiating, let X = 'determine the rules of morality'. Therefore, God can determine the rules of morality."

A clever twist on the above, but flawed in nearly the same way. Let Alice be an omnipotent God, for whom the above holds true. Now consider Bob, the "almost-omnipotent God" for whom the following statement holds: for all X, where X is not 'determine the rules of morality', Bob can do X. Now, how do you distinguish Alice from Bob? It's impossible in general, because "determining the rules of morality" is not an operation that has any observable effects. If you have evidence that some deity is Alice, then you have equal evidence that it is Bob. Therefore, you have no basis for believing that you should defer to this being. Only your own moral judgment remains.

"God is all-knowing, and must have higher moral judgment than you."

First, again, you only have God's word for this; it could be a lie. Second, even if this fact is true, knowing what is good is vastly different from doing what is good. It is possible for an omniscient being to know what's good, but prefer to do evil. And, once again, one can only distinguish between a good omniscient being and an evil omniscient being by exercising one's moral judgment.

"God can send you to Hell, and therefore is the final arbiter of good and evil."

Stalin could send people to the gulag, but that didn't make him moral. If a being possesses the power to damn people to eternal suffering, and that being is evil, then the morally right action is to defy that being, and the highest act of heroism is going to Hell.

(I would also claim that willingness to damn people to eternal suffering for acts committed in a finite lifetime amply demonstrates that the being is evil, but that's independent of this argument.)

"God did [insert good thing here], therefore God cannot be evil."

First, one can easily do a mixture of good and evil, and still be evil or amoral. I bet many evil dictators in history have been kind to their pets. Second, even raising this argument essentially proves my point that one must exercise one's own moral judgment. If you really believed that God's moral judgment overruled your own, then it wouldn't really matter what you think is good. The fact that you feel obligated to bring up an example that you judge to be good shows that you believe in your own moral reasoning more than any authority.

Now, again, in all of the above, I am granting arguendo the reality of some subset of the fictions in the Bible. I don't actually believe in these fictions, so I don't really have to consider the problem. But religious people who endorse the evil in the Bible (or any fraction thereof), even as a matter of allegory, do have this problem. All religious people suffer from unjustified belief, which is an intellectual failing. However, over and above that, I will always regard their refusal to judge their gods as a moral failing.

A reply to Pascal's Wager

A recent post by P. Z. Meyers mentions, among other things, Pascal's Wager. There are a number of standard replies, which the Wikipedia article mentions. The following reply applies to a fairly general version of Pascal's Wager, in which we assume that belief without evidence has some cost but it's outweighed by the negatively infinite cost of disbelief.

It is possible that there is an army of invisible dragons on the far side of the Moon that are preparing to mount an attack that will lead to the extinction of humanity. These are highly technologically advanced dragons, which is why we have not detected their existence. Plus they are invisible. Now if the invisible dragon army exists, we had better pour all of our social resources into mounting a massive thermonuclear assault on the far side of the Moon, because if we don't get them before they get us, we are all going to go extinct. Clearly, there are four distinct possibilities:

1. The dragons do not exist, and we do not believe in them. In this case, OK, we pretty much go about our lives as we do now.
2. The dragons do not exist, and we believe in them. In this case, we waste some societal resources in nuking the Moon, but at least we get to survive.
3. The dragons exist, and we believe in them. In this case, yay! We nuke the dragons and we get to survive.
4. The dragons exist, and we do not believe in them. Holy crap, now we are in some deep shit, because when the dragons attack, we are all doomed, doomed!

This is, you will note, basically isomorphic to Pascal's Wager. Now, if you look at these four possibilities, you would conclude that we had best get started nuking the dark side of the moon, post haste.

Except --- holy shit --- what if the evil army of invisible dragons is actually on Mars, and the dark side of the Moon is, in fact, populated by twinkly Tinkerbell fairies whose magical fairy dust is the only weapon that can kill an invisible dragon! After all, these dragons are magical --- they already live on the dark side of the Moon, and a massive wave of high-intensity radiation may just bounce off their hide. Now we are into some deeply heavy shit, because having bought into our former analysis, we are investing major social resources in nuking the Moon, but if we nuke the Moon we are all doomed because the fairies will all be vaporized. And holy cow, how do we know that the fairies are on the Moon, and the dragons are on Mars? What if the dragons are on the Moon, and the fairies are on Mars? Now we've got a head-spinning vortex of possibilities:

1. The fairies exist on the dark side of the Moon, the dragons exist on Mars, and we believe in them. In this case, we send some fairy-harvesters to the Moon to gather up all the fairy dust, plus we need to build some fairy-dust-crop-dusters that can function in the Martian atmosphere. We dust the dragons and yay! We survive!
2. The fairies do not exist, but the dragons do exist; but the dragons live on Mars, and not the Moon, and we choose not to believe in any of it. Now the dragons are going to come get us, and we are all doomed, doomed!
3. The fairies exist, and they live on Mars, but the dragons do not, but we believe that the dragons exist and the fairies do not. In this case, we will probably nuke the Moon, but the fairies live on Mars, so no harm no foul. Plus we didn't even need the fairies to begin with, since the dragons do not exist.
4. The fairies exist, and they live on Mars, and the dragons live on the Moon, but we believe only in the dragons and not the fairies. In this case, we will end up nuking the moon; but --- damn! --- we still die, because we do not realize that the only way to defeat the dragons would be to mount a Mars mission to gather magical fairy dust.
5. The fairies live on the Moon, the dragons live on Mars, and ---

Wait a second. What if the dwarves who have lived underground in Caucasus Mountains since the dawn of time could forge us an enchanted sword, with which our chosen champion could command the dragons? In that case, we had better pour all of our resources into invading the Caucasus Mountains and contacting the dwarves, before some random terrorist stumbles upon the hidden cave entrance and says the Word of Power that unlocks the gate that has been shut for countless millennia. Because if some terrorist stumbles on the hidden cave entrance and speaks the Word of Power, we are all fucked. Plus, we need to maintain military hegemony over the world indefinitely, and if we could command the invisible dragons, we would basically have military hegemony sewn up.

Man, I never knew that computing a simple wager would be so difficult. I'm beginning to lose track. I mean you've got the dragons and the fairies and the dwarves, and holy shit what about the starfaring guild of alien wizards? What about the Ancient and Venerated Order of Elephant Shamans? What about the Conspiracy of Snowboarding Yetis? What about the Creeping Evil from Beyond Space and Time? This matrix of possibilities is growing exponentially with every sentence. But basically, the point is, in most cases, you're better off believing that everything exists, because what if it does? HMMMMMM? WHAT IF IT DOES EXIST? Then we are all FUCKED. So believe, motherfucker, believe, before the Teddy Bear Von Neumann Probe From Alpha Centauri turns the entire solar system into a bazillion cute and cuddly polyester toys.

The Wages of Sin

PP points to a post by one of his friends, HK, who writes:

"Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I do not reject Christianity because of my desire to go around sinning without any guilt; I reject Christianity because I have closely examined its claims and I have found them to be unsubstantiated."

This sounds rather like something I posted in PP's comments some time ago. (Maybe it is.) But actually, upon reading this today, I realized that one of my reasons for rejecting religion is that I do want to go around "sinning" without any guilt --- if "sinning" includes such acts as doing work on Sundays, having premarital sex, and the whole host of other ordinary human activities that are arbitrarily prohibited by Christianity. It's an affront to human dignity to be forbidden to do something "just because", and that's a large part of what religions do.

One could argue that the prohibitions on ham and cheese sandwiches or tattoos are relatively benign (although still offensive in their arbitrariness), but when the control extends to things as important as people's sex lives, it becomes monstrous. We're on this Earth for a short and often lonely time. Physical intimacy answers one of our deepest needs: the need to narrow the gap between us and our loved ones, however temporary that narrowing may be --- as Rushdie writes in The Moor's Last Sigh, "defeated love ... is greater than what defeats it". To exhort people to forego sex without the blessing of archaic contractual rituals is no less immoral than telling mothers not to hug their children.

The Bible claims that the wages of sin are death. If you define "sin" as "anything prohibited by the Bible", I believe that the wages of sin are something far less morbid: happiness.

The wrong Christians, and the cowards who accommodate them

Via M. Yglesias: Brein Leiter reports on a Houston Chronicle article stating that Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, publisher of biology textbooks, is caving in to pressure from the Texas Board of Education to include information about "Creation Science" in its textbooks. Because of Texas's size, it has disproportionate clout in the composition of textbooks, which are made for national publication (it's too expensive to prepare different editions for different states).

Lest you should be taken in by idea that, "Hey, what's the harm of presenting the alternative view?", read the FAQ. "Creation Science" and its alias "Intelligent Design Theory" are not science. They're monstrous, tendentious loads of nonsense masquerading as science in order to leech off science's aura of authority. Teaching "Creation Science" in a science classroom is tantamount to teaching The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a history class.

The maddening thing about modern society, as Iain Banks pointed out in one of his short stories, is that these medieval morons can live amongst all the cushy conveniences wrought by science, and yet reject (and indeed, actively work to undermine) all those pieces of science that conflict with their religious ideology. It honestly never occurs to them that, for example, the same atomic theory that governs radioactive dating also makes the electronics in their televisions work. News like this almost makes me think that believers in "Creation Science" should be exported to the Australian outback and subsequently forced to live the remainder of their lives without any access to the fruits of science, which they obviously hold in such rich contempt. While they work backbreaking hours on the farm squeezing a meager subsistence from the earth, dying from dysentery and plague, they can comfort themselves with the warm and fuzzy knowledge that evolution is non-scientific, and that the Biblical literalists were right all along.

Note that many members of my family, and at least one of my good friends, are Christian. There are plenty of Christians who are perfectly non-objectionable. However, I find it deeply disturbing that mainstream Christianity has failed to stand up to the "Christian Science" element within its midst. I can only read this as a deep failure of intellectual integrity; and a failure that's much more widespread than you might think. I would guess that most of the members of my parents' church, from when I was growing up, believed that evolution was bollocks. I spoke to at least one person who dismissed biology because "scientists say we came from monkeys", a proposition that was apparently self-evidently bogus to him. When I was in high school and still observant, I had a conversation about evolution with one of my youth pastors; as soon as I mentioned it, he began spewing the same old "Creation Science" claptrap that I'd read about on the Internet. I once overheard my mother listening to a religious talk radio show where the speaker, misrepresenting a recent discovery in cosmology that was leading scientists to revise the standard model of the Big Bang, claimed that "physicists are puzzled by this discovery, but I'm not --- I've always known the Big Bang was wrong, because the Bible says the Earth was created six thousand years ago." I had read about this discovery in the popular scientific press, and of course it did not contradict the Big Bang theory at all. My mother, an intelligent and educated person with a Master's degree, seemed to accept this monologue as hunky-dory. I told her it was a lie, and I'm still not sure that, in her gut, she really believed me instead of that charlatan on the radio.

Oh, and the kicker: the churches we attended when I was growing up were in New York State (Westchester County, no less), and the congregation consisted mostly of educated middle-class people with at least a college degree, and often with graduate degrees. I can only imagine what it's like in Texas.

It's only against this cultural background that one can really understand Daniel Dennett's op-ed on "The Brights" (note interesting thread on collaborative philosophy blog Crooked Timber). If Dennett evinces some condescension towards the religious, well, in my opinion, they've earned it.

(And anyway, where was this religious zeal for tolerance and respect when the Church was burning heretics and atheists at the stake? Christians who complain about Dennett's condescension remind me of Republicans who fought civil rights tooth and nail in the 60's but suddenly rediscovered the virtues of color-blindness in the affirmative-action 90's.)