New Comment Policy

I could probably make this a page, but I’m not sure how long I’ll be using WP as my main blogging engine.

Anyways, a guy commented on my post yesterday and made a ridiculous claim about Sam Harris, without any evidence to back it up.

This irritates me, since I don’t like stupidity on my blog. So, here’s my policy, in a nutshell:

You can say whatever you want, provided it’s not too profane, and if asked for evidence, you’re given 24 hours to provide it. Otherwise your comment will be deleted.

It’s entirely possible to have fun, thought provoking, argumentative discussions without tossing out baseless claims, and keeping everything civil. Let’s work on that.

What we can learn about God from atheists

I know that title probably came off a little weird, given the context in the blog, but it’s not mine. It’s from a Sunday school class that Sara’s mom told us about at Riverbend Church, and that we attended this morning.

Now, I tepidly entertained attending, largely because I was afraid that the building might burn down, or I’d be shackled, or our room would be hit by lightning, but luckily none of that happened.

I missed the first part of the series, where the teacher discussed Bill Maher’s Religulous. I’ve tweeted about it, but in short, I thought the movie didn’t offer particularly anything new, and it was obvious that Maher used the same ambush interview style prevalent in Expelled, so I found the movie a little disingenuous.

Today he covered Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great. I was excited that I knew the book and author he was covering, because at least I’d be able to keep a mental tally of the speaker’s honesty.

Unfortunately, the very beginning of the presentation went to discuss his looks and his drinking habits. So, starting off the discussion with an ad hominem and a well-poisoning didn’t do much to offer anything promising.

Luckily after that brief introduction, the guy covered the book itself. He covered Hitchens’s main questions and problems with religion, and then offered a (sometimes too brief) synopsis of each chapter, usually agreeing with Hitchens’s points, but always providing some wiggle room for his version of his faith to be in the clear.

Example: Hitchens claims that we’re beyond the age of miracles, because we have a sound understanding of the fundamentals of the universe. In the book, he discusses his role as devil’s advocate against the sainthood of Mother Theresa, whose miracle can more reasonably be attributed to a new (at the time) Kodak film than it can to an angelic presence.

From this, I see that Hitchens explains that the most recent “miracle” was nothing of the sort. Does it mean that the previous miracles of earlier saints and of Jesus weren’t? I can’t answer that, but I can say that many things previously thought to be magic are now well understood and require no magic, so it’s reasonable to say that the earlier “miracles” were probably better explained as poor understanding than as actual divine intervention.

The speaker, however, took Hitchens as saying that because that one miracle was fake, there are no such thing as miracles. That’s a fallacious statement, because you can’t prove a negative, you can only say that things observed up to this point haven’t been magic, to our knowledge.

The speaker offered token arguments from incredulity regarding the design of the eye, which I wasn’t too impressed with, but then got to an interesting point: Hitchens doesn’t separate god from religion.

He points out that Hitchens has problems with the actions of people, and not with the actions of a god. There’s a few problems, but I think in short, he’s mostly right. Hitchens does have a problem with the people claiming to be god and the doctrine that they’re trying to impose on humanity. Original sin. The Bible. The Koran. All of those are meant to be divinely authored (or inspired, whatever) documents, but come across bigoted and evil in many chapters, so, I’d say he has a problem with god by association.

Does this mean that people are misapplying their respective Good Books? Possibly, but then it leaves open the question of what’s a metaphor, what’s fact, what’s important, and what’s “mis-translated”?

The other problem I had with the speaker’s assertion was when he says, “note that Hitchens never came out and said ‘God does not exist, and here’s proof.’” It’s impossible to prove a negative (go ahead, give me evidence that there’s *not* an invisible pink unicorn above my car that goes everywhere I go), which is why nobody tries to. The *reasonable* position, though, is that “X is false unless proven otherwise.” (see: null hypothesis).

So unfortunately the speaker (and I’d say everyone but me in the room) just start from the fiated position, “our god exists,” whereas I start from the opposite, “there probably is no god, but I welcome your evidence for it.” Because Hitchens dedicates several chapters to demolishing the arguments for a deity, there is no evidence left remaining, and I stick with my null hypothesis, and go on with my day.

Near the end, the guy insinuated that Hitchens leads an evil/depraved lifestyle, saying, “I could paint Hitchens in a really bad light because of some of the choices he’s made, but I don’t want to do that.” But that was sufficient to continue to poison the well.

And to close things, the speaker (whose name I really wish I could remember, because I hate writing “speaker” or “teacher” repeatedly) said that if you look at Maher or Hitchens on TV, they’re not happy people, and the most peaceful and happy people that he knows are Christians, implying therefore god exists. This is an argument from final consequences, and, just like every other logical fallacy, has no bearing on the question at hand.

Overall, I enjoyed listening to the talk, though was disappointed at the lack of discussion at the end (I think they met for lunch perhaps to do that, but we’ve got kids, so that wasn’t going to happen). I really like the moderate Christian stance that most of the people in the room entertained, where they just wanted to love and help people, and the rest of the book is irrelevant. I just don’t think many other people picked up on the same bad logic as I did.

There’s one more session of the same topic next weekend, but I’m not sure if I’ll go, seeing how it’s Father’s Day, and I kind of just want to sit in the hammock all morning. We’ll see.

As a closing note, I’d like to re-emphasize that I think Sam Harris is, hands down, the most likeable and articulate and reasonable modern atheist author, because his books have a much clearer point, and he can express things without slurring or relying on ad hominems. Go pick up Letter to a Christian Nation, it’s a 1.5 hour read, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Developer Requirements

Apologies for the terribly named post.

I was thinking on the way to work this morning about classes that I thought helped me write software, and classes that were meaningless. Keep in mind that I’m only evaluating these classes according to what’s helped me work, not what’s helped me in everyday conversation or social gatherings or whatever.

• Statistics – I only took 3 hours of statistics, but I think having a fundamental understanding of measuring things is incredibly useful. It helps you learn where to look for problems and pain points.
• Science – This isn’t really a class, because I don’t think any of the science classes you take in college help you learn about the scientific method. That’s not entirely a bad thing, because there’s a lot of information they need to give to you so you can understand the higher up physics courses, for example. Understanding how to isolate variables and constraints and make testable hypotheses informs everything I do nowadays.
• Automata – If you think of regular expressions as pictures, instead of arcane symbols, it helps a lot.
• Technical writing – Being able to communicate effectively over email, understanding desirable typefaces, etc., I think have been helpful.
• Data structures – You know, it’s funny. It was one of the first CS classes I took, so I thought it’d be dumb, but I got to work out a lot of how queues and stacks and trees worked before having to rely on them heavily.
• Systems programming & Operating systems – When you start running your own applications (because of funding or because it’s too complicated to convey to someone else), knowing about schedulers and memory leaks and threads and processes and shells is incredibly useful.
• Assembly or C – Most of my early classes were in C++ (I know, not C at all), but at least I got some of the syntax, and then I did several classes that involved asm. I think those were awesome, just because you understand what needs to be done to move information around a computer, and how (and when) it gets expensive.

Not so helpful:

• Algorithms – I think this is probably more a result of the teacher than of the class itself. I think having a basic understanding of bigO is important, but it’s not important for an entire semester. I think understanding code and statistics provides a better foundation for optimizing and choosing algorithms, and our teacher didn’t offer any of that.
• Chemistry – I still don’t understand why I needed to take this class.
• Circuits – Has had no bearing, whatsoever, on how I do my job. I’ve tried my hardest to block out how inductors and capacitors work.

This is an incomplete list, but if you happen to come across it, maybe it’ll make you smarter.

Tidy Gem, Rails, Segfault, Pain

I’ve been dealing with Tidy gem issues for the last 48 hours, and look to have made my way out of the woods. Here’s a few things for whoever might google this (segmentation fault, ruby, rails, tidy, eval):

1. The old tidy gem, the one you’ve probably installed (version 1.1.2) is NOT maintained. This is a problem, because as structs in libtidy change, if the tidy gem isn’t updated to reflect those changes, segfaults happen.
2. DO NOT, FOR THE LOVE OF WHATEVER, USE 0 FOR FALSE. I know, this seems stupid, since in C, 0 is false. But it’s not in the library. Right. I know. Ridiculous. This mostly applies to the tidyopts, fwiw.

Anyways, I’ve put up a gem (and will maintain it, and comment here if you have issues) that has the necessary updates to work with the latest version of Tidy.

Find it here: http://github.com/terrbear/tidy/tree/master