User:Armondikov/Now/Feb12

28th February 2012
Plots In film, you only get to do things once, and apparently remakes are deemed unimaginative or sacrilege. Not so in theatre, where you expect a show to come back later, perhaps with any entirely different director and production designer, different cast and different setting. So when doing anything for the theatre there is always two visions coming across; the writer (and composer if in musical/opera) and the director. You can create dramatically different ideas from the same source material, simply by playing with what you have available and what you can do with it.

But it does depend on the source material. Attempts to update Dialogues of the Carmelites usually suck, as going too conceptual or modern with that one completely strips the religious persecution from the story, and the genuine threat on the lives of the lead nuns in that opera is what makes it work and is what gives it a finale that makes audiences cry rather than go "what the fuck did I just see?" (Bretch be dammed) - and Poulenc's well-known devout faith comes across in the music and writing, so by stripping that back you are left with something incredibly hollow. Resetting Carmelites outside of the French Revolution rarely works.

Others lend themselves very well to adaptation. Currently, I've been dragged in to help with a production of Yeoman of the Guard, and while it was originally set in the Tower of London during the reign of one of the Tudor monarchs, you could easily be forgiven for thinking it was written especially for being set in wartime London. Seriously, even the overture sounds like the nationalist music of the early-mid 20th century than the late 1800s (when it was written) or the time of Elizabeth I (when it's set). The characters blend perfectly into stock characters of the time and drama is so adaptable too, with references to sorcery adapted to treason, of course.

But playing with the ambiguity of the ending is where it comes into its own. There's usually a controversy over whether Jack Point dies at the end, and many contemporary adaptations of Yeomen make use of modern technology to make it resoundingly clear that he puts a gun in his mouth at the end, usually off-stage but very audible. Yes, it's not considered Gilbert & Sullivan's darkest work for nothing. In the case of the version I'm involved in, we've kept the ambiguity (although Word of God, aka The Director, has told me which way it goes) by having him wander off into the middle of a bombing raid at the height of the Blitz, while the rest of the cast run for shelter. Wandering off in despair to contemplate killing oneself is an angle, wandering off recklessly in despair and not caring is another angle entirely, perhaps a level of despair above having the care to commit suicide explicitly. So this keeps the ambiguity, but it's a more realistic ambiguity - traditional productions have him merely run off in a huff, but having him walk outside as the air-raid sirens wail underscores a severe threat on his life.

This is really the cool thing about theatre, IMHO. If you're making a film (or writing a book, to be fair) you're making the version of record. It's the final thing and that's it - George Lucas excepted - and while you have ambiguity (Is Total Recall all a dream? Is Deckard a replicant?) you only have one chance to edge that ambiguity in one direction or another, or hint at it in one direction or another, or keep it as confusing as possible. When you can re-imagine something on stage anew each time, you get more chance to play the what-if game. In more subtle ways, doing Carmelites a few years back let us change which characters were sympathetic and which ones weren't, and doing The Magic Flute almost upended all the established character relationships completely, despite making relatively minimal changes to the story (not that there's much story involved there). With Jack Point, we can develop an ending that is far more intense than anything imaginable when it was first performed in 1888.

27th February 2012
Atheism and the supernatural Should atheists disbelieve in the supernatural; ghosts, the soul and psychic powers?

Ask a dozen atheists and you might well get a dozen different answers back. This tends to happen when you ask a "should" style question, as labels should describe not prescribe your beliefs. On the face of it, the answer is a clear and resounding no. Atheism is about only disbelieving in God - or gods, but that's where it gets tricky. The problem stems from the fact that atheism is merely a reaction to existing religious belief and belief in deities in general; atheists don't get to choose what they don't believe in, it's the religions that get to decide that. So you've been handed that nice sub-set of supernatural things marked "gods" and said that you don't believe in them, that earns you the Atheism tag because that's what we call that action in our terminology shorthand. Can we infer more than that? Not very reliably, unfortunately.

But... Taking atheism in such a strict and narrow sense actually makes it quite weak as a position. Putting a ring around the things called "gods" and saying you don't believe in them is a good way to distinguish yourself from the people who do believe in them, but doesn't really say anything constructive about yourself. It certainly relies too much on being a contrarian, merely dismissing "gods" because other people believe in them, and giving very little conscious thought to the myriad ones you disbelieve in even though no one else does either. Hence why "gods" as opposed to the grand monotheistic "God" causes the issue to be very tricky; there's no easy way to cut off what a god is and what any other supernatural entity is. Legendary creatures blur into the mythology of old, and suddenly the difference between god and mere crypid blurs dramatically. Gods form a sub-set of the supernatural, but a very arbitrarily poorly defined one.

To believe in ghosts and souls, but not God or gods, is to be picky and choosy with the components of the so-called supernatural that you allow yourself to subscribe to. In the grand scheme of potential beliefs and disbeliefs, this choice is pretty arbitrary. So arbitrary, in fact, that it's like saying that you can believe in a god that wears blue socks, but you can't believe in one wearing red socks. That sort of selective edict is very close to what we associate with the concept of religion - the righteous believe X, the heathens believe Y. That wouldn't make atheism a religion, but it might make some atheists religious.

This is part of the problem I have with using "atheist" as a term to describe myself. In a narrow and poorly defined sub-set of what I think, it's very true and for the most part I'm happy to use it as a quick and dirty way of describing myself in certain contexts. But you can't infer much more about me - my opinion on the soul, on UFOs, on ghosts and fairies - without making the label far more prescriptive and demanding that "atheists should" do this and that.

23rd February 2012
Tesco Value Slave Labour

Last night on 10 O'Clock Live someone made the claim that people working on "work experience" with Tesco aren't slaves because they are paid, they're paid by us, the taxpayers. The argument for this ridiculousness seems to stem from the idea that if someone is getting Jobseekers Allowance (welfare/benefits) then they should work for it.

Riiiiiiight... for those still terminally confused by this, let me just lay this down in a couple of cute little bullet points:


 * Premise 1: a) Society is built upon the foundation that if you work, you get paid for it. So you can buy the simple pleasures in life, such as food so you can live. b) To prevent exploitation, the government mandates a fair minimum wage. This is effectively what a person's work is worth, at minimum.


 * Premise 2: a) Those who aren't working would not be able to afford to eat so would either turn to crime or just simply die of starvation. b) To counteract this we provide an allowance to the unemployed and help them get into work.

It should be fundamentally clear from the outset that the conditions described in 1 and 2 above are mutually exclusive. If you are working, you get paid a wage. If you are not working, you get paid the allowance. There is no conceptual middle ground or overlap between these two situations. The government pays people to look for work and not to starve to death in the process. Companies pay their workers to work for them. Have I hammered this home enough yet?

By letting a company, especially one that makes about £10 million a day in profit, take on workers being paid the allowance we are crossing and confusing the boundaries between the concept of working and unemployment. the statement that these people are being paid for by the taxpayers (so therefore aren't "unpaid slaves") is an absolutely ludicrous defence, as it should be quite self-evident that this is wrong, just from that statement alone. The government pays people not to starve to death, not to work.

Secondly, the way this is being thought of is backwards. For every person on this "work experience", Tesco won't need to employ another person - they get this work for free. Work that has a mandated value as explained in premise 1 above. Effectively, Tesco is saving a lot of money at the country's collective expense. We aren't paying their workers - we pay them anyway under premise 2 - we're actually subsidising and paying this company almost double that. Why do our collective taxes go to subsidising private firms that are in a healthy state of growth and proft?

Has the world gone stupid not to notice this or am I genuinely smarter than political commentators and government officials? Because while flattering, the latter is quite a scary conclusion.

20th February 2012
Categories

So, two big dumb essays on this topic in a row. I feel really fucking dirty right now.


 * Essay:Painting the World
 * Here I'm basically saying we have to produce categories because we can only hold so much in our heads. "Is it a human being?" is an easier thing to process than "does it have skin?" + "does it have two arms?" + "does it have a head?" + "does it have hair on its body?" + "does it have...". But this often gets abused and we draw conclusions that are too general. For instance, the gender binary: if we see a "male", can we infer that they like to drink beer, read FHM and watch football? If we see "female" will they like pink and talk about knitting?


 * Essay:Learned sets
 * This one is about motive. If we generate a category, what seems to interest us more is whether we can ascribe a certain inferred property to it. We're interested in asking if something is "alive" or "not-alive" because we want to know if abortion should be legal, not because the observed properties of an embryo match up with those of the fully grown human that's carrying it. We can't decide more easily because we seem to have learned what things are alive and what things aren't alive, rather than figured out how we can tell which is which.

18th February 2012
Needs said...

There's the usual overused trope the suggests that Richard Dawkins needs to read more deep theology before he can promote atheism, and that he attacks a straw man version of religion for his own sake. Therefore, he has no right to criticise and reject religion because he doesn't understand it.

Really? Take the sentences above and replace generic "religion" with "Christianity" and you'd have a far more accurate representation of how the Courtier's Reply works in practice. So to any Christian who claims Dawkins doesn't properly understand Christianity, I have to ask...

Are you a Hindu? No.

But have you read the four Vedas and extensively immersed yourself in Indian writings and philosophy, which date back to be the most ancient religious texts that still have relevance in a surviving religion? No.

Are you a Scientologist? No.

But have you read Dianetics, or perhaps no anything of the auditing process, such as how E-Meters work and what a floating needle means? Surely you'd know some of the most advanced revelations of the OT-8 level, or maybe even have reached a completely clear state? No.

Are you a Muslim? No.

But do you know the Qu'ran inside out, in the original translations, or have you been to Mecca to view the pilgrimages or understood the Sharia completely? No.

I could go on, but three examples is usually sufficient to get a point across. Anyone who picks a specific religion has implicitly rejected all the others. The reasons they have rejected the others need to be clear and concrete, and importantly must not also lead to a rejection of their own chosen religion. We know from looking at arguments for God and religious apologetics that this particular burden is never really carried.

By contrast, an atheist doesn't need to be immersed in religion-specific theology. They can, indeed, attack a straw man version of Islam or Christianity all they like because all an atheist needs to do - should they even feel the need to justify themselves in the first place - is reject the general concept of religion. That's a different question entirely from "prove that Yahweh doesn't exist", and doesn't even need us to understand the theology of someone who has privileged their own hypothesis and never really proven it in the first place.

16th February 2012
Hey look, a black man's willy! When I was stupidly young (this being a combination of young, stupid and too stupid and too young to realise I was young and stupid) one of the "big kids", as "big kids" are wont to do, showed me a trick where you can completely burn a matchstick down from tip to the very end, turning it completely jet black. From that day forth, this object, this dark, twisted burned out former-matchstick, was called a "black man's willy".

A riddle bit lacist, perhaps? Well, here's the odd thing. Up until only relatively recently, if you had uttered the words "black man's willy" to me, I would have seen and thought of only a burned out matchstick. Nothing more. There were no racist connotations to me. I mean this in a very literal sense, not some "oh this is just white-boy privilege" sense, I mean very literally it was only a burned out matchstick that was represented by the four syllables "blak" "manz" "wil" "ee". I didn't even think about it as representing a penis, never mind one belonging to a certain ethnic group, and definitely not in the sense of mocking it, either. Think about it for a moment, a complete and utter lack of a fully formed concept in my head as if someone had just called it something random as if plucked from a fantasy novel name generator and that forever would be the title given to a burned out matchstick. The idea of a racist implication was so unformed and unconnected, in fact, that it took until only about a few years ago for me to say it out loud in front of someone, and it took me a good 15 seconds to get why they seemed shocked. Perhaps I just didn't think about it enough. Which in my defence is true; I've lived in four decades (so far) and may have said the words out loud twice (maybe), and perhaps burned through a matchstick out of boredom four-five times at the most. Out of old ideas to scan for mental viruses, this wasn't high on the list of priorities. Perhaps the "big kid" who was showing it off back in those heady days of the very early 90s did get the racist part and knew what it meant, I don't know, but when we talk of memes not being able to transfer with very high fidelity, the racist component was certainly one that was very much lost in the translation.

Now, I could talk about consciousness raising, which is a valid message to take from this, but my point here is intent. Was I, personally, being racist by burning out a matchstick and calling it that? I would certainly feel pretty offended if anyone said yes given the description above - it would be the logical equivalent of implying racism for calling it a "Fu-She-Ne'watai", which is about as random and arbitrary a word as I can think of right now. It's not too dissimilar to an occasion when I wrote the words "fuck off" on a sheet of paper and handed it to someone; I was 7 years old and had learned that phrase all of 4 and a half hours earlier. I was hardly flavour of the month for a while, but for all I did (in my head) I could have written down some ancient glyphs that just happened to be offensive in the native language but I had no idea. Here are some random Chinese characters: 富舒瓦特的 Are they offensive? I don't know, I just pulled them randomly from Google translate. Offensive intent simply isn't present in these situations - I think I would have been aware of it. Come to think of it, I have a vague recollection of "fuck off" being a compliment, now what does that imply?

This is why I'm uncomfortable with people labeling certain offensive activities as "isms" too wildly and too quickly. In purely a descriptive sense, I have no qualms with it - such things are deeply offensive to some people and so should rightly be treated as such. The problem arises when we take a purely descriptive case and then infer intent and motive on top of that. The joke might be racist, is the person telling it also racist? The difference is internal knowledge and intent. Labeling a person as "racist" implies that they have, in their head, a little trope that reads "people of other ethnicities are inferior" - and frankly, I've met the charver prats hanging around shops drinking cider shouting "PAKI!!" at passers by, and I don't think they're capable of a trope that coherent. More likely, they're just out to cause offense for the sake of it and just pick an option from a little drop-down menu: are they fat, are they a goth, are they Asian, are they old, and so on. It makes me wonder if the guy I once saw start muttering "ching-chong-ching-chong" upon seeing a couple of Japanese students doing taking some photographs was actually being racist or just having some kind of involuntary animalistic spasm due to a stimulus-response relationship.

Intent is important as that's what distinguishes things like murder and manslaughter, willful vandalism and an accident, and a denialist attitude and simple ignorance. Guilt and the mens rea required for us to pass certain types of judgment don't automatically come with observed descriptions of acts, you need better evidence than that. More generally, I'm uncomfortable with the overall concept of "absolute liability". When we judge people, we need to judge by the attitudes they actually posses, not the attitudes we assume they posses based on poor evidence - we have the distinction of willful ignorance for a very good reason.

Needless to say, I'm now fully aware of the racist connotations of the burned out matchstick gag, but the image - still minus those connotations - is still etched firmly on my memory.

15th February 2012
A little story Suzanna sat down on the uncomfortable pew. Cautiously, of course, as she was alone and had no idea why she decided to come here. It was a strange whim, but something just felt right about doing it. The preacher was already in full swing ahead of her, warming the crowd with some anecdote or something. His volume made it easy to hear, but his strange intonation made it difficult to listen to and she could barely even figure out his point. The crowd seemed pleased, though, so perhaps she should have been there for the beginning. Whatever it was that he was doing, it seemed to work. The plain walls of the room, and minimal fuss to the furnishings was hardly inspirational yet people insisted on cheering along. First slowly, then building momentum until the entire room swayed. Suzanna herself was the last to join, cracking an uneasy smile as she tried to clap along. The matriarch of the family just to her left passed her a reassuring glance, and suddenly she felt the need to let go.

Minutes later she found herself in full swing. Singing, clapping along with the others and swaying from one side to another while the preacher continued his work to get the crowd working with him. She hardly knew any words, but picked up what she could. Before she realised what was happening her throat was getting raw from the singing - perhaps she really should have came earlier to get warmed up properly for this.

The charismatic voice at the front called for volunteers. Shouting into the microphone about the holy spirit, Jesus, God and sin, demons and angels. It almost didn't matter what his words were considering his tone, his passion and the fact that those in front of them were experiencing an ecstasy that transcended what words could convey. From a small huddle, it started, chairs moved back to make a space and all who were standing began to get involved. Placing his hands upon their heads, anointing them with the power to let it all go, he worked the crowd some more. Then it began in earnest. A man, hardly a day out of his twenties began to tremble and shout, spewing words from his mouth that made no sense, as if he had gifted only pure passion and joy to the world rather than mere sounds and mere language. Collapsing to his knees he continued to quake and the preacher moved onto the next, one by one they fell to their knees, pushed to their limit by unrestricted power and glory.

Suzanna found herself bustled into the middle of the crowd, being drawn into it all. Finally, after what seemed like an age of frantic commotion, she came face to face with the preacher himself. Their eyes met, locked for just a moment before he reached out and held his hand close to her head, just touching the freshly washed hair that was cascading down her cheek.

"Do you believe?" He cried.

"I believe!" She shouted in return.

"Do you believe?" He insisted again, more powerful and more dominant than ever.

"I believe!" She cried out in return, louder than ever as it took over her. Tongues spewed from her in a voice that was hardly recognisable as her own as she collapsed into the preacher, holding him close as she wailed in passion. He raised her hand high and shouted into the microphone once more, proclaiming her to be touched by the spirit itself. She continued talking the nonsense again until she fell to the floor, just in front of the preacher, looking towards him but beyond him, her eyes vacant as she shouted out again.

"I see it!"

"See what, child?" He asked, his voice now quieter but as impassioned as ever.

"It's beautiful. It's an angel of the Lord!"

"She sees an angel of the Lord!" He repeated, the crowd screamed, collapsing down. "Tell me what you see, you believe!" He continued talking a little more, and the crowd died down just enough to hear him speak rather than roar over him.

"I see light. I see the beauty of Jesus. The Lord, He's speaking to me!"

"The Lord Jesus speaks to her, ladies and gentlemen the Lord speaks to her, as he speaks to all. Tell me, what does he say?"

She stayed down, reaching up as the preacher brought the crowd to a crescendo ready to hear her exact words, on edge to hear every letter that the Lord would deliver through her.

"He says..." She stood up, collapsing her arms to her side and sighing. "Nothing at all. I just made that up. Really? You thought someone was actually speaking to me?" She turned to fight her way through the crowd and left the church quickly, in desperate need of a stiff drink somewhere.

What if it's a deception?

Okay, so the point of the that story isn't that religious believers are gullible morons - well, it sort of is, but there's also a more general sense to it. We have to examine it not from the perspective of who is doing the deceiving, but who is being deceived. I.e., the audience, the believers, and the preacher in the church. While it's a far-fetched piece of fiction (and whether an event like this would alter a believer's mind is another question entirely) it can be a thought experiment that asks what happens if someone is feeding you fake evidence and suddenly reveals as much to you. It's a question of how we react to such a thing, and how we go about avoiding being suckered in by such faked evidence in the first place or, more generally, insufficient evidence - which is the same as "fake", as it would lead us to an incorrect conclusion about reality, but without the connotations of active and intentional deceit.

What if Suzanna had continued her little stunt and seen it through to the end of the service, leaving the church without telling anyone that she was just setting them up for a YouTube stunt in the style of the Religious Antagonist? What if she came back the next weekend and continued the act, and the weekend after that? What if the deception continued indefinitely, or at least until The Lord took his revenge and had the heroine of the story ran over by a truck? No one would be any the wiser to the fact she was faking the entire thing from the start. Perhaps this does actually happen, and people just don't quite have it in them to reveal the deception at the end of the day.

Yes, someone deceiving and lying is dishonest and it's quite a twatish thing to do, but this isn't the point - we can follow to an incorrect conclusion from insufficient evidence, and so a deceitful narrative is more of a red herring at this point. From the perspective of the believing audience, they cannot tell the difference between such a lie (or misleading evidence) and the real thing. Their expectation is that it is real, and this is only swayed when it is said otherwise. Up until that point, and that point only, they are convinced it is genuine and there is no difference, in their minds, between the real and fake experience. If the deception was not revealed they would still continue to believe it, the only thing that has changed is that someone has put their hands up and said it was all a lie. Because of this, they make no attempt to actually challenge their reality, or challenge the evidence in front of them. They simply have no reason to do so, it appears. In fact, can you imagine people just waiting for the Pope to turn around at the end of an address and say "joke's on you, suckers!" to the audience? It's unlikely because such an event isn't desirable, and the revelation would be deeply shocking. This is the workings behind confirmation bias - we make no attempt to challenge something to see if it's deceitful, or insufficient (more generally, misleading) so will be unaware of it until it decides to show itself as such of its own accord.

We could, of course, excuse the believers; they're simply following what evidence they can see - someone speaks in tongues, it's the Lord, it's what they know and have no reason to doubt that it's completely genuine. Except that it is exactly this sort of doubt that allows us to be far more confident about what we believe - because we end up constantly challenging it. Our confidence is improved when things survive the challenge, and we can eradicate what doesn't survive the challenge. We don't do this by constantly reassuring ourselves, though - exposure to more people speaking in tongues is not evidence that Suzanna isn't faking, and Suzanna saying "no, really, I do believe!" is not evidence that she's not lying! This is a bit of a conundrum; because how do we actually go about proving that someone is lying?

When it comes to someone lying, it might be very difficult to catch them out as they very much have the capability of taking a lie to the grave and thus removing our ability to catch them out forever. But that's a practicality, really. As long as we have the opportunity we need to constantly ask the question "what is the difference between this evidence for my belief being reliable, and this evidence being misleading?" In principle, that question should always produce an answer, and when we get that answer we can start looking. If it doesn't, you're either not trying hard enough or you belief is trivial.

So, what would be the difference between someone speaking in tongues because they're touched by a spirit, and someone suffering mass hysteria? How would we want to test between the two? If there's no difference, then the theory that it's caused by a spirit is of trivial value. If there is a difference, we can look for it, we test for it. The great thing is, though, that it's not incumbent on to me to answer this question.

14th February 2012
Categories Schmategories I recently spotted this quote from Marjan Satrapi, an Iranian graphic novelist (that's the politically correct term for "comic"), and was quite impressed.'

The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.

I think, however, that it's a shame most people will pull a very specific anti-government message from the quote. The contrast between the US and Iranian governments, one being a near totalitarian regime running like an oppressive theology, and the other being Iranian, is quite a stark and salient one.'

But more generally the issue is of how we categorise and look for similarities. Nationalism, or in its politically correct guise of patriotism, is an attempt to produce the illusion that we have more commonalities with people of our own country than of any other possible grouping. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have more in common with my fellow aspiring rationalists in the US, New Zealand, and Russia, than I do with the majority of people in my own country. Similarly, a gay man in England is more likely to have things in common with a gay man from Sweden than he is with just any man in England. An orthodox Jew in Russia will find more common ground with an orthodox Jew in New York, a female heavy metal fan in Albania will share interests more with a female heavy metal fan in Denmark, and so on. The more general message from Satrapi's point is that those people being shit on by their governments have more in common with people being shit on by any government than they do with their own government, even though they're national kin. The idea that nationalistic commonalities are dominant is merely an illusion. This isn't, of course, to say such groups of people are completely identical and homogeneous, or are certain to have commonalities - it's entirely probabilistic, comparative and based on the number of properties and characteristics we deduce from our categorisation of them.

For example, suppose we listed 10 properties of "national character" - 10 things that supposedly defined a person from a particular country. A love of tea, perhaps, or being a baseball fan. Even if each individual property was shared by a clear majority, 80% for the sake of this quite illustrative model, then the odds of someone having all 10 properties is actually 10%. So that's a very minute fraction that actually posses all 10 characteristics (presuming they're independent, of course, but I'm simplifying), and so to make the assumption that all these people posses all 10 characteristics - or worse, to suggest those who don't aren't "True" members of the category - is a deeply illogical move. Our exceptions, people who don't posses all 10 characteristics, are actually in the majority. This simply makes our inference of these characteristics quite useless. To hammer home the idea of broad categorisation, it's easy to refute the validity of horoscopes because they divide people into 12 arbitrary groups - and so the conclusion is that we expect to have over half a billion people experience the same sort of day. This is obvious nonsense, but why is it more obvious than to claim that the tens of millions will also agree because they're from the same country? Granted, it's more reasonable than a horoscope (as the division is smaller and less arbitrary than by birth month) but it's still a very large brush to go painting with and we can generate categorisations that are even more reasonable and useful than that.

If we categorise more finely, however, we make fewer such leaps of deductive logic, and perhaps we'll get to a point where our exceptions are actually in a minority. I'm not saying we should exclusively categorise on the examples above - as those (gender, sexuality, religion, musical taste) are still too broad to draw any decent conclusions, again the exceptions are probably in a majority, but are just demonstrably better than categories that are broader still. If we categorise broadly, we should be most willing to accept a higher degree of variance in our inferred characteristics - that only 10% of people will exhibit all 10 of the "national characteristics" as mentioned in the model example above, and a majority will, in fact, lack a few of them. We should be prepared to accept this sort of variance and shouldn't be surprised by it, and certainly we should prescribe against it with a No True Scotsman rule.

For instance, someone I know recently expressed surprise at the fact that Liz Trotta, as a woman, would say something utterly and deeply ridiculous about rape. But why is this surprising? As a woman, and only by this level of categorisation, Trotta is placed inside a group that represents 50% of the population, that's 3.5 billion people. While it could be a reasonable inference, expecting 3.5 billion people to have the same opinion is quite a stretch - then you're talking about projecting a specifically feminist mindset on all those 3.5 billion people. Far more relevant than Trotta's sex/gender is that she's a commentator on Fox News; this places her in a group that is far smaller and far more united in terms of the views they share. Our exceptions are likely to be in a minority and so our deductive ability to predict what someone is going to say considering they're about to be interviewed on Fox News is far more useful than our ability to predict what they are going to say considering only that they are female or male.

So, tight categorisation allows us to maximise reasonable inferences about people and minimise unreasonable and excessive inferences about people, placing our exceptions in a minority rather than majority. It requires more categories and, alas, more mental effort, but the alternative is to fall into a trap of unfair stereotypes and categories that actually give us little useful predictive ability.

7th February 2012
LANCB I have this overwhelming urge to LANCB, to blank everything, write a "fuck you" note and scramble my password. I have no idea why. It's not like it's been sparked by anything or that recently I've hated everything. It's just a feeling.

I'm going to take up Kolinahr.

5th February 2012
You don't believe in God? (V) Based on this card


 * You're doing the Devil's work!
 * So those times I've given to charities, helped old ladies across the street, not murdered anyone... that's the Devil's Work? Good to know, I'll keep it up.


 * If you read [religious text] you'd change your mind.
 * I know it's obvious as facetious but, hell, I'll say it anyway: "If you actually read [religious text] you'd change your mind". Especially all those people going to church and then stopping off for a bite at Red Lobster afterwards while wearing polycotton dress shirts, boy are you guys in for a shock when you read the Bible.


 * You are so closed-minded.
 * Okay, I'll do a serious aside for this one as "open mindedness" is one of the most abused terms ever invented. Having an open mind doesn't mean blindly accepting something as true, or even accepting that it's true until further notice - that's just plain gullibility. "Open mindedness" is really best expressed as "open minded consideration", as it is the mark of an intelligent person to consider an idea without accepting it. You don't need to agree with a view, or subscribe to it, or admit it exists to run a little thought experiment in your head to examine it and study it. Indeed, it helps because you're not blinded by your own bias in accepting it. If it works out to be a good idea, then you can accept it. Providing someone doesn't outright reject an idea as untrue (with infinite certainty) without any consideration, the accusation of being closed minded is unfounded.


 * Stop being intolerant of my beliefs!
 * Here's the thing about religious belief: when confronted with an atheist, believers essentially think "holy crap, someone who doesn't believe, maybe it isn't true after all!!" It's a simple defence mechanism, to preserve belief, to distrust non-believers. An atheist is an anathema to a believer and their very existence is a threat and a danger. It doesn't matter how mild mannered someone is, any attack is perceived as a threat or some kind of exercise in intolerance. In reality, this is no more founded than someone's skin colour making them, by default, intolerant of your own skin colour.
 * But that's just the existence of atheists; what about the ones who go a little further and dare to justify their beliefs, or make an argument or - shock of horrors - maybe even write a book on the subject? In this case, the fundamental response is that no belief should be sacred and beyond criticism. At all. Ever. It is not intolerant to criticise, or to not subscribe to an idea, and it certainly isn't intolerant to state why - even openly - you don't subscribe to those ideas. Believers tend to be very insecure about their beliefs (why do you think they have to assert that they know, and have 100% confidence in them?) and so stifling any criticism or dissenting opinion is vital. Incidentally, did you know that the constitution of the UCCF Christian Unions forbids them ever inviting a speaker in who isn't a evangelist in the Cult of Jesus? Exactly; they don't accept any differing opinions at all, it needs to be protected in a bubble.


 * God doesn't believe in atheists either.
 * Oh... wait that means... *disappears in a poof of logic*

3rd February 2012
You don't believe in God? (IV) Based on this card


 * There are no atheists in foxholes
 * Actually, we have one of our very own. Go pester him about it.


 * But you have to believe in something!
 * This is seriously the most annoying trope ever. The thought of someone believing differently to you brings up a hard point to swallow: maybe you're wrong. This is especially true when you take faith position of infinite certainty, that niggling doubt will eat away at such sureness. Believers can at least agree with each other because they at least believe something, they can brush off the existence of other religions as "they at least believe they just have the details wrong". This is how so many different sects of Christianity can exist despite the fact that one likes to wear magic underwear and another eats its own god. Atheists on the other hand, well that's just something else entirely. It's difficult to rationalise the fact that people simply don't believe. In fact the entire thing is abhorrent on many levels - not only is it then conceivable that you have the details wrong, but that you might be in the wrong ball park entirely. That must be pretty fucking hard to deal with when you're so insecure with your beliefs that you have to assert 100% confidence.


 * Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot were atheists, you know.
 * This is usually countered with an argument about whether Hitler was actually Christian. There is the whole "Positive Christianity" and it's hard to escape the whole "God is with us" on the belts of SS officers and the fact that Hiter was raised Catholic, that all complicates matters. Similarly, I often like to quip that Stalin couldn't have been an atheist because he believed in himself - although that requires you to know something about Stalin's insane ego.
 * No, this is about associations. Stalin and Hitler both and impressive facial hair - as does Fidel Castro and so does did Saddam Hussein. They also breathed oxygen and drank water. They were also all composed of atoms. They each had a brain, and a heart, and liver, lungs and so on. They all spoke a language. They walked. They manipulated things - often their impressive facial hair, I'm sure - with their hands. In short they were all human. These similarities far outstrip similarities narrowed down just to religious belief or lack thereof. If your view of the world is simple enough to think this as a serious point, and remember this is no straw man as Ben Stein did a movie saying the same thing, then I truly pity you.


 * What are you going to tell your children?
 * About what? Sex, drugs, rock and roll and how totally fucking awesome they all are? Seriously, though, I will raise my kids to not believe everything I tell them without thinking it through and finding out for themselves, and to offer that same attitude to everyone.


 * I'll pray for you.
 * Cheers. Good to know you care. Now, obviously, I don't believe it works so it won't affect me... but it will affect you if you do believe it works. So riddle-me-this: If I asked not to be prayed for, would you still do it?
 * Unfortunately this is rhetorical, as I have no "you" to address, really, but if someone did believe it worked would they violate the trust of someone else by going against their wishes? I think that would be an interested point to fathom, particularly given some of the reasons that you'd hear "I'll pray for you".

You don't believe in God? (III) Based on this card


 * God loves you anyway
 * Thanks, I love God anyway! Wait, what? Yeah, that makes no sense.


 * What's stopping you going on a crime spree right now?
 * In terms of physical restraint, nothing. In terms of mental restraint, then it's my own personal moral convictions and an innate instinct that humans have, probably, evolved to have. I care for others, I don't wish harm on others, I don't fuck around with people, in other words, I'm a good person. At least I'd like to think so, though I'll be the first to admit that I'm not perfect.
 * While I don't like answering questions with more questions, we can turn this one around; "what's stopping you going on a crime spree?" If the implication is that you need religion to be good, and evidence would suggest otherwise, then that means the only thing stopping a religious believer going on a crime spree is God. Which, let's face it, isn't a good reason. That's not being good, that's being terrified into obedience. It seems to imply that if God was somehow disproved, or that this person lost their faith somehow, they'd immediately go on a crime spree. I'm not comfortable hanging around these people.


 * Pascal's wager
 * This one takes a while to refute fully. But in short, it's silly. It makes too many assumptions, about both people and about God. While the game theory aspect is interesting, there are so many theological objections to the set up that I'm impressed anyone takes it seriously. The implication is that only people who believe are rewarded in heaven and that actions count for nothing? I know this is a doctrine of many Christian sects, but please, why is an almighty omnipotent being supposedly so obsessed over whether people believe in him? It's like the Bible has effectively developed a narrative of the most insecure creature ever!


 * Aren't you afraid of hell?
 * Not really. I'm not usually afraid of things that aren't real. Apart from the monsters under my bed, I haven't cleaned under there for a while and I think they're multiplying. Seriously, I can't sleep because of them, I swear I can hear rustling like they're preparing to feast on my flesh... but I digress. No.


 * I feel sorry for you, not having a reason to live.
 * I feel sorry for you needing to be told a reason to live. I live for the sake of living and make it what I make it. It's quite cool, actually, and I don't have to hate gay people or get up on a Sunday morning. Religion doesn't - and hint, it never has - had the monopoly on supposedly "deep" questions. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Come off it, if you need someone to give you reassuring answers to these questions in order for you to feel intellectual and deep, then you're likely not to be very intellectual and deep. Come up with your own solution, or read around and construct your own. Or better yet, recognise this sort of thing as meaningless and only used as part of the mechanism religion uses to propagate.

You don't believe in God? (II) Based on this card


 * It takes just as much faith to be an atheist as a believer
 * Religion offers certainty. A matter of faith says God is 100% certain to exist. This is obviously not particularly clever thinking as if you don't account for the possibility of your reasoning being wrong. You might be 100% confident for reasons X, Y and Z - but how confident are you that X, Y and Z is right? I.e., your workings. And how confident are you in that reasoning, and how confident are you in you assessment of that? Atheism as a statement of 100% faith is as fallacious as a religious statement of the same thing - however, no one really uses atheism in those terms. You can simply admit that you don't believe in God - you anticipate, act and expect there to be no God - and give a certain confidence interval for it, accepting that you might be wrong if evidence says otherwise. That removes the problematic nature of needing any degree of "faith", but it doesn't make you consider God as a plausible possibility.


 * How arrogant.
 * Yes, I know. That's because I'm just that awesome.


 * You can't prove there's no God!
 * Well, no one really has to. The usual response to this is the burden of proof, which is fine but it's often peddled out as if it was a Bible verse and mentioned something. Certainly we can't "prove" that there is no God, any more than believers can "prove" that there is one - and let's not get started on them proving their specific God, we all know that doesn't happen. In the casual sense, "proof" like this is asking for 100%, or infinite, certainty and so is a remarkably absurd request. But we can, however, make a decent stab at a good confidence interval - and figure out what to believe based on that. We have to ask what evidence would we expect if there was a God, although for this you need to define God very precisely in terms of observational evidence, which believers usually decline to ever do. So let's consider testable things like prayer, or miracles, or spiritual healing. Without exception these tend to be, when tested properly, not real effects. Believers say this doesn't constitute proof or evidence that there's no God, as absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence... except, actually, it does. Absence of evidence for God is evidence of absence of God - as such a case of affairs is more likely to be associated with there actually being no God. And that's actually demonstrable with conditional probability, look it up.


 * Atheism is a religion too.
 * This is a remarkably interesting canard, usually responded to with things like "stamp collecting" and "atheism is to religion as bald is to hair colour" - but again, these are merely simplistic tropes. There are two things going on with this accusation.
 * Firstly, if you want to include atheism as a religion you need to do it by giving a definition of religion, i.e., what does that word represent. What is the membership test for the set of religions - or in less maths-based terms "if I point to something, what questions do I need to ask to see if it's a religion?" It's perfectly possible to create a set that includes atheism and label it as religion that way - what's difficult is doing it without also including things like supporting a football team as a religion, or going to work for a company as a religion. Essentially, you broaden the label "religion" so wide as to include so much stuff that it ceases to become useful, you could point to anything in the world and say "religion". It loses meaning, it conveys no useful information (and that's in an information theory sense) by saying it as it doesn't narrow down a near-infinite number of things to something more specific very well.
 * But secondly, you have to wonder about "implicit" atheism. That's atheism where someone has no concept of the question of religion vs atheism. They simply haven't considered it, haven't been brought up in a world where it's even been thought of. Granted, this is more of a thought experiment given the ubiquity of religion, but we can consider animals, new born babies, and perhaps even non-sentient and inanimate orange peels to be very much atheistic. And yet someone would consider these as having a religion?


 * The evidence for God is all around you.
 * Evidence and how to use it has already been covered, but this one lets us ask what is worth considering as evidence. Obviously, the aim of this "the evidence is all around you" is to suggest that the world is enough evidence. But is it? Simply put, we need to determine if such evidence is exclusively due to God. This is why, when doing an experiment, you control for things. The world exists, yes, but how applicable is that to God as described, in a non-circular way. What aspects of the world can only be described by God. And I don't mean something amateurishly shitty like the Kalam argument, I mean actual exclusive evidence that doesn't have like a unconditional prior probability of ~100% anyway. Given naturalistic science, evolutionary theory, physics and so on, there's little for God left to hold exclusive command over, so we're left with absurdity such as "a God that is good and loves us still ends up commanding us to live in a world that eats us, hates us, causes pain and suffering and televangelism". We have to ask, given what evidence actually exists if you don't cherry-pick the fuck out of it, "what is the difference between this world and a world without a God?" - if you can't come up with a suitable answer that isn't totally stupid, then you cannot use it as evidence.

You don't believe in God? (I) Based on this card


 * Where do you get your morals?
 * Almost certainly where everyone else gets theirs from; an internal instinct to do what is best for ourselves and the people around us. Theft induces mistrust in others and will cause others to distrust us - so we don't do it. Murder, similarly, but it also actively harms people and our empathy can make us imagine what it's like to lose our own lives. Certainly getting them from some ancient books is a bit odd, because said books aren't comprehensive moral rulebooks at all. Indeed, most of the actions in those books appear to be about preserving the belief system, rather than any level of morality; such as how the Qu'ran mandates killing non-believers and how nearly half of the 10 commandments focus on God's ego.


 * You'll grow out of your rebellious phase.
 * Still waiting for that one to happen. Though implying atheism as the rebellious phase is interesting. It implies religion is the Default - well, not only that, but also that it's one specific religion that is the Default. We might find this one said towards those who convert to another religion.


 * So you want to outlaw all religion?
 * Oh boy would I! But seriously, no. That would be a bit stupid.


 * You're what's wrong with society.
 * It's been covered extensively that the biggest threats to society aren't really correlated with religion so much. When people become self-absorbed, care only for their own in-group, demonise the out-group, find their morality dictated by an external source, blindly follow orders, suffer server cognitive dissonance... oh wait, I've just described religion! What is wrong with society is people, and individuals who won't put others in society higher or even level with themselves. Racists, homophobes, the general right-wing of the world who hold dearly to Conservative ideology. The irony here being that such people tend to cling onto religion too as almost a statistical certainty (at least in some places) and use that religion to justify their ideals - even though their religions usually say the opposite. Except for the homophobia thing, I think the Bible was pretty fucking clear on that one.


 * 95% of the world believes in God, doesn't that say something?
 * We say that "reality isn't a popularity contest" for a reason. Although 95% of the population may believe in God "of some kind", it's not united under the same belief. In fact, if you take groups of identical theistic beliefs, worldwide atheists aren't far off the largest group (IIRC, Catholics form the largest coherent group). The high degree of variance and sectarianism in the major religions prevents them being unified in large groups such as "Christian" or "Muslim" because when you get into the nuts and bolts of what they believe, they vary quite differently. I think this fact says more. If there was any objective truth to religion then they wouldn't come and go (consider ancient religions) or be so varied across the world. In fact, the most unifying trope seems to be more along the lines that people must have a religion of some kind, and that it doesn't matter what it is. If this was removed from the meme-pool (by magic!), I'm pretty sure it would die practically overnight.

2nd February 2012
Okay, so I've been in the pub all afternoon... For the last time, it wasn't me!