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NQbass7
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Name: Eric
Gender: Male
Interests: Playing music, listening to music, jamming, etc. etc.; Ultimate Frisbee, Running, and Biking. I also enjoy learning anything I can: "Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself — will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth of a gear in my thought machine. [...] Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.'"
Expertise: Electrical Engineering
Occupation: Student
Industry: Engineering
Message: message me
Member Since:
7/21/2003
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| Let's See If I Can Keep This UpAlright, I'm going to try to keep posting. I've got a lazy Sunday afternoon, I'm not tired enough to nap, but I don't feel like doing anything... so maybe I'll post. There's a few things I want to post about, so this will wander and we'll see where it goes. At some point I'll want to go back through the past few weekends, but that will be a long post and I don't feel like doing it now.
I will say that this past weekend, I played frisbee and my knee gave out on me (again). I'm so sick of this injury. I'm so sick of the guy who dove at my ankles and took me out almost two years ago. I'm so sick of not being able to trust my legs when I run or jump. I'm so sick of having to hold back, not give all I have because I don't know if my knee will handle that dive or that jump. I'm so sick of giving all I have and having it put me on crutches. I'm so sick of the doctor who told me my knee was fine and who wouldn't advise an MRI for me last fall. I'm sick of it. I don't understand how people can say our bodies are "perfectly designed" when our knees (and so many other body parts) break so easily. I'm tired of it. I can't even remember anymore what it was like to be able to run normally, to be able to jump without thinking about my knee, to be able to actually fake someone out and make a hard cut to the disc without worrying that I'd end up on the ground in agony. Sometimes I think about just how different my life would have been without that one dive, that one day, that one second.
In other news.. a post I've put off for almost three months now. So sometime.. I think back in February.. (yeah I've been lax on the posting) I was up in Minnesota hanging out with some friends. And we played this game called "Would You Rather." If you don't know the game, it's exactly like it sounds like: you ask people questions starting with Would You Rather, such as "Would you rather have maggots in your ears, or worms between your toes?" There's different kinds of questions, from gross things to fun things to philosophical things. I've played it in many forms in the past, but this was an actual boardgame with pieces and tons of questions on cards and other stuff. We played one game, and then sat around and read the cards to each other.
One of the questions that came up was (and I don't remember the wording exactly, but hopefully I capture it well enough to maintain the meaning) "Would you rather be ignorant and happy, or know everything and be bitter?" Almost immediately, I knew my answer was the second one. Happiness based on a lie seems to me to be a far worse choice than knowing the truth. I was about to say so, when almost everyone in the room simultaneously agreed that they'd rather be blissfully ignorant. I was stunned... not only did some people think that, but every single one of them. And they were so certain of it that they all answered immediately.
I know that I tend to have a different personality than many people. I know that I'm more concerned with truth, with epistemology, with being accurate than the average person - even the average person in my group of friends (or even just those in my same social situation), who I think on the whole are more concerned with it than the average American. But I cannot conceive of thinking that it is better unequivocally to abstain from learning or knowing or being accurate in order to be happy. I have trouble understanding that point of view. But, as Yudkowski says, if you truly cannot understand someone's motivations for doing what they do, then there is a problem with your view of the world that needs to be corrected. So I spent a lot of time thinking about it.
My first thought is that they didn't really mean it. Perhaps they didn't really understand what they were committing to when they said that. I can almost guarantee that, had the question been slightly different but involved the same principles (such as "Would you rather a friend lie to you to make you happy, or be honest with you?") they would choose honesty, even if it made them unhappy. As far as I can tell it's exactly the same principles at play: knowing the truth and being unhappy, or being blissfully ignorant. I know that it's somewhat of a cultural meme to say that - "I'd rather you were honest with me even if it hurts my feelings." It's one of those things that happens in TV sitcoms all the time, and that seems to be where many people get their relationship/friendship cues from these days. But I really do think that in general, they'd rather know the truth. So then why the difference between the small scale (knowing the truth from one friend) to the large scale (knowing all truth)?
Maybe it's that they foresee themselves recovering from the unhappiness that a harsh but truthful criticism from a friend brings. Maybe they see it as only temporary, whereas the bitterness of knowing everything wouldn't ever go away - you can't un-know that.
And I guess when I think about it, I'm also breaking the rules of the game some. The game stipulates that you can't alter the terms of the question or try to get around them. For example, if one of the options was having tacks stuck in the bottom of your feet so it hurt when you walk, you couldn't choose that and then choose to be in a wheelchair the rest of your life - that's not the spirit of the question. But when I think about "knowing everything and being bitter" I think it's a loaded question. I think if you knew everything, you'd know exactly how to make yourself happy. And beyond that, I find it hard to imagine knowing something that would make it impossible to be happy. There's a lot of talk about how not believing in a deity is depressing, or that if we just cease to exist when we die then we should be nihilistic, but I manage to believe in neither a deity nor an afterlife and still live a fulfilling, happy life to the best of my ability. I've quoted this particular episode of this show so many times, but zefrank says:Gilbert says that your brain has the ability to synthesize happiness to
bring you back up to your baseline regardless of the circumstance that
you find yourself in. And the synthesized happiness is just as real as
happiness created by external circumstance! I can't see knowing the truth as ever being so depressing that you couldn't get yourself back up to your baseline happiness, no matter how depressing the truth might be. That could just be a failure of my imagination though.
Now, the one thing I can see, that would really make me choose the first option: if I knew everything, there would be nothing left to learn. Now, you could always choose the "happy and ignorant" option because then you'd have everything left to learn, but I think that too goes against the spirit of the question. But for me, one of the biggest thrills is learning something new, finding out new things. If you knew everything... that would be gone. There would be nothing left to learn. I could see that as being depressing. And it makes me wonder if the human race will ever reach a point like that - if there's some limit to what can be known or learned. It seems like a possibility if the singularity is ever reached, because not only will mental processing capabilities be increased massively (allowing the learning of far more things, as well as an increase in the speed at which we learn things), but subjective experience could end up much... slower? faster? I'm not sure what you'd call it, but people would experience what we know think of as one second as a much longer time frame due to faster thinking (which means even if our lives are the same length, it will feel like we live much longer and the average person will have far more experiences in a lifetime). I suppose that's a problem that will have to be dealt with in the future.
I guess it just struck me that the people I consider my friends would choose that. I've said it before, but for the most part I don't make friends with people who aren't intelligent, or don't care to think about things. It sounds mean, but it's not a conscious thing - I just enjoy people who think about things more than people who don't. So when all of these people answered that - almost immediately - it really caught me off-guard. Especially since to me, thinking/knowing/learning is one of the most important things in my life. Perhaps more than anything else. So important that I got a tattoo about it. I guess I just don't understand it - so I'm trying to refine my worldview.
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| What? A Post?Alright, I'll post something I guess. It's been almost a month and a half since a real post, so I'm going to have to ease myself back into it by just posting some quotes I liked. And since I got the urge, I figured I had better take advantage of it and post quickly, even if I should be working right now. So here's one from Mark Morford, who I'm subscribed to in my blog reader, talking about Laura Bush. (Note, he tends to be a lot of ranting, which I enjoy now and then, but I do realize it's mostly just ranting.)
For in choosing to be and do
almost nothing at all for all these years, Laura has also come to
epitomize the compliant, unobtrusive woman, the worst kind of example
for modern young women today. This is, of course, why conservative
Republicans and fundie Christians love her. They call her "classy."
What they mean is: She knows her place, keeps her mouth shut, possesses
exactly zero sexuality, speaks only when spoken to, lets the men do the
"real" work, stays so far off in the background she might as well be
wallpaper. And here's Ed Brayton (another subscription) talking about the mayor who decided to buy 2000 burlap sacks and have people wear them and pray to reduce crime in his city: And here is the part that always baffles me about such prayers: what
about free will? If praying is going to help reduce crime, it could
only do so if God intervenes to prevent some people from committing
crimes. But what about free will? Isn't that the argument we always
hear for why God allows things like violent crime to take place? If
people have free will to do bad things, and this excuses God from
responsibility for their actions, then God can't intervene to prevent
people from exercising their free will or he no longer has that excuse.
There's just no coherent thinking behind all of this. And finally, via PZ, two stories about Wheaton (I lived in the city for a summer, but would never have considered going there even when I was Christian) from Hank Fox, the first of which I can certainly relate to having apostatized in the period between when I signed up for a theology class and when I started taking it. He has a blog as well, one entry of which really resonated with me. I've gotten very good over the past few years at "skirting" issues - not lying, but not revealing the information that I know would make things awkward ("So what denomination are you?" "Well I grew up in a Methodist church, but went to a Lutheran school."), but I always sorta hope that someone will find me out and actually ask me (and truly want to know) about what I believe. The other story about Wheaton is from a college professor who <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-divorced-prof-29-both-apr29,0,6497533.story">got fired</a> from Wheaton college because he got a divorce and it apparently didn't meet "Biblical standards" according to the college. (To be more accurate - he didn't want to discuss it with the administration so they could ensure that his divorce did meet Biblical standards.)
Alright, that's what you get for now. I'll hopefully get around to posting more soon.
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| New YorkSorry I haven't been posting much lately... I've been busy. Well, really, I've been watching House M.D. and playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl. I'll get back to posting at some point soon hopefully. But not this weekend - I'm driving out to New York City this weekend, just for the hell of it. About fourteen hours each way, and I'll only spend about 8 hours there.. but it'll be interesting. I'm definitely looking forward to it. But now, it's time to sleep so I'm not tired when I'm driving tomorrow.
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| Religious NegligenceI'm sitting at work right now eating lunch, and I just finished listening to the people on the other side of my cube wall discuss this story. It was... enlightening, to say the least.
Here's the gist of the story: child gets sick with diabetes. Family decides that they won't treat the child with medicine, but instead will pray really hard. And get other people to pray. Child dies. Is it negligence?
I've heard two people over the wall talking before, and it's pretty obvious they're both evangelical Christians. One of them (the one who's a lot more vocal about it) wasn't there, but the other one was, and someone else came over and brought it up to talk to him about it. It was really hard for me to not go over there and join in, but I'm fairly certain that would have been a horrible idea.
Basically, their conclusion seemed to be that if a family does what they think is best, it shouldn't be considered negligence. Somehow, I doubt they'd use that rationale if this were about any religion except the one they believe in. For example: if my religion says that when someone gets gets a cold, the best thing to do is cut off a finger and then pray that the wound heals, is that something that should be prosecuted? What if my religion says that it's best to kill babies immediately after they're baptized so they don't go hell? Is that murder? Where do you draw the line? If it's okay to let someone die when there's an obvious, well-known way to treat them (take them to a doctor), is it negligence to not do that? Or, as the Christian over the wall suggested, is the government interfering in its citizens' lives too much? He compared this to cases where the government takes people's kids away because the parents spanked the children. I'm amazed at the mental gymnastics it would take to consider letting your child die and spanking them as equivalent.
There were a few other highlights that, had I been over there, I would have commented on. First, at some point one of them described it as "two competing religions. Which one do you take as right? On the one hand you have the religion involving praying, and on the other, the religion of science. Why should the government force you to take one religion?" Alright, hang on a second. Calling something a religion does not make it one. Strapping feathers to your butt and flapping your arms doesn't make you a chicken. You can't just say "it's a religion, therefore it's equivalent to praying." There's a major qualitative difference: one works, the other doesn't. This is common knowledge. So it opens up the question: are we allowed to make irrational decisions not based on reality? Or, more specifically, are we allowed to make those kinds of decisions when they lead to another person's death?
They talked some about weird religious beliefs - "if I believe that taking a bath makes me better, can they take away my kids for that?" Well, I would say if you gave your kid a bath instead of calling 911 after they got stabbed, then yes. So what if that's what you thought was best? That was another thing that kept coming up - "If they did what they thought was best, then how can you prosecute them for that?" Because it's the consequences that matter. If I didn't intend to pull the trigger while I was waving a gun in someone's face, but do accidentally, I still get charged with (at the very least) manslaughter. Intentions matter in what you get charged for, but good intentions don't mean you're automatically innocent. Whether or not that's how it should work is debatable, I suppose - you might argue that there's no benefit to putting someone in prison for something that was a complete accident. But how our legal system currently stands, it's a crime to kill someone whether you had good intentions or not. And in this case, it wasn't an accident. It was a willful choice to avoid methods that are proven to work in order to use ones that have been shown not to work.
If you judge based on intentions, then where do you draw the line? If you just say "It's okay to do something just because it's religion, even if you have no evidence it will work and have abundant evidence someone will die if you don't do something else," then what isn't acceptable? Defense of crimes will simply be "I have a religious belief that compelled me to do it" - and then it's okay.
I honestly don't understand how this case is even debatable. They failed to get medical care for their child, even though they were capable, and the child died because of it. How is that not a crime? How can they say "There
is no reason to remove [the other children]" when they just let one of their children die? The mother "believes the girl could still be
resurrected". How is she not declared insane? This, right here - this story - this is why it's not okay to just let people believe what they believe. This is why irrational beliefs have to be brought up, argued against. This is why it's important, and why I care. If someone's irrational beliefs about religion don't spread to the rest of their life, that's fine - but here's an example of what happens if they do. You sit around folding your hands and thinking really hard instead of taking your daughter to the doctor.
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| Leaving the FoldValerie Tarico has an article up at the Huffington Post that I liked. It's about the difficulty of leaving the Christian faith. Here's a few excerpts:Many who lose religion muddle along in silent shame -- wanting to
believe, praying desperately for doubts to be removed, blaming
themselves and fending off images of eternal torture before finally
giving up the fight. Granted, some lucky few simply flip a bit, but
others find themselves dragged reluctantly into an internal conflict
takes years. For me, it didn't take years, but there was a lot of that guilt involved. In fact, that was a big part of my life when I was a strong Christian too - the guilt of never being good enough. To be sure, I still have similar emotions now - feeling like I'm not doing a good enough job at work, feeling like I've failed a friend or family member - but they're not nearly as strong as the guilt of failing a God.Most religions implant psychological safeguards against apostasy,
little emotional bombs of fear, guilt, shame and self-loathing that get
triggered by the mere act of questioning. In religious orthodoxy, doubt
is the domain of fools. It is the consequence of having hardened your
heart like Pharaoh or resenting God's power like Lucifer. Oh ye of
little faith! Oh how true this is. And to me, this is one of the biggest reasons I still care enough about religion to spend this much time talking about it, to try to defuse those bombs in other people - or at least to show them that it's worth setting one or two of them off to get out of the circle of them you're trapped in. And the absence of these harmful qualities is something I like about liberal religions.
The article isn't very long - it's worth checking out.
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