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I’m sick of crazy people lying about “secular thought” in major newspapers

Why have people got to go around continuously misstating and, well, lying about the implications and demands of a secular worldview? For example, take this sentence:

Once the world is … thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves”

OK, completely aside from calling some of the most elegant and impressive discoveries of humankind (friggin’ fundamental laws of physics and evolution, ladies and gentlemen) “particles randomly colliding and sometimes evolving into complicated shit,” (The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, Stephen “I Hate and Fear History” Smith) this description of secular thought ignores hundreds of years of secular thought. Which, don’t worry, Stanly Fish will continue to misrepresent and misunderstand for a good 1776 words, in the end arguing that there are no non-spiritual reasons for doing anything. And, no, I did not make that number up.

This fundamental misunderstanding of what “secular” means is important because the article is all ab out how we make public decisions: what appeals is it legitimate for a member of government to make? Fish starts off by saying that “policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons,” which — given a minimally good definition of “secular” — I agree with. Policy decisions should be made based on the effects they will have on the world, not on of many imaginary deities. Unfortunately I edited that to make him look like less of an idiot, this is is a more complete version: “policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons, reasons that, … do not reflect the commitments or agendas of any religion, morality or ideology“. (emphasis mine)

Allow me to provide you with a selection of the most popular ethical systems around today, the systems that most inform current American morality according to my incompetent analysis:

  • Utilitarian Ethics (do what makes the most people the most happy)
  • Respect Ethics (do unto others as though they deserve the best you can reasonably do. This is a mild reformulation of the golden rule, and based on the fact that you have probably never given a homeless person your credit card, the version of it that you actually follow. Usually called duty ethics.)
  • Fulfillment Ethics (do things because they will help you or others be the best people that you/they can be. Usually called Virtue ethics, because that’s what they called things back when Aristotle was writing.)

Know what those fundamental systems of morality all have in common? They are secular. Which is to say they do not depend on unjustified assumptions that threaten you with eternal torture for their basis. Oh, wait, that reminds me, I forgot one:

  • Ignoring all of the effects of my system, because I don’t care about how people live. (Usually called religion.)

That one does depend on unjustified assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality, assumptions which (often) conveniently involve your horrible pain for a literally meaningless amount of time.

Quickly take a look at those four systems, tell me if I have misunderstood any of them, recognize which ones you actually use to make decisions. And then think about how you don’t actually need to incorporate anything non-secular to reach those same decisions. Every worthwhile moral theory is secular. Seriously Stan, don’t be a jerk.

Oh no here he goes again:

While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.

If he was going to be so technical about it I’d think he’d want to bound us a little tighter and say “nanometer” at least. He is so insanely incorrect I can think of about 7 things before I type the number “7″ to use to argue against him. Let me lay out for you a simple example of secular reasoning that I don’t care if anyone disagrees with, because they suck:

  1. Getting raped sucks big time.
  2. We should prevent people from raping other people.

OK? Stan and Steve, would you say that I have stayed within the bounds of the “truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of ‘public reason’”? And, if I haven’t, could you please explain you me why (2) requires me to appeal to some fundamental teleological aspect of the universe instead of just pointing out that we should keep things that suck from happening, if we can help it?

Oh, wait, you never address that.

Here’s some more gibberish, loosely related!

If [secular] reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?”

Well, because one of the empirical facts is getting raped sucks. That is a fairly well-acknowledged and -documented fact. There are a variety of other observations of the human condition that count as facts that allow us to make a wide variety of other well-formed and non-arbitrary arguments about how to behave.

No way that is not a sleight of hand.

Sweet. I expect my invitation to perform at the Magic Castle by the end of the week.

This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the “pure” investigation of “observable facts.” It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.

I wasn’t going to include that, but I really love the use of scare quotes around “observable facts.” And I felt like it was only fair to make him look like even more of an idiot, because the article really pissed me off.

He goes on for awhile with some other minor misunderstandings and lies about the definition of “secular,” as well as some truly interesting problems — what does freedom mean? to whom do we owe what? — unfortunately the only case that he makes against secular thought is that it seems to be incapable of observing humanity. Which is, you know, false.

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2010
02/23
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happydays.txt

hi there. my name is brandon. I come to write to you a memorabilia. A short memory, that is to say. Something fun for everyone, the whole family.

I was walking through the park one day, and I stumbled. Fell down, didn’t see the path, tripped, choked my way into blackness.

As it were.

This, being a short memory, you’ll forgive me if i don’t elaborate. It is like swimming in cold water: you’re pretty sure you should be panicked, or at least your body thinks it should be. Freezing water, the kind you can see ice float past. When you swim: you can see ice float when you swim. It’s a bad idea to dwell in it. Cramps, nausea, a violent retribution; people say stay away with good reason. But there are places to swim, people to see. Or avoid. These things are here for a reason, don’t let them tell you they’re not. There are good reasons for saying that they’re not, but, that’s not the reason to let them not tell you that they’re not. Just keep swimming, is the thing.

Your body can only panic for so long, is the thing. Keep this in mind: panic is useful, it keeps you swimming. Without a continuous flow of adrenaline you would give up. That, as you can imagine, is fatal when walking through a park. Do not give up; walk through the darkness and the bracken. There is only so far that you can walk in the middle of a city before you meet someone of like mind, similar vocation, maybe a hint of hypothermia.

It’s the blue lips that you should look for.

What, no plot? Plot assumes a point: a place to go, something teleological. Law and the word — the end word — the word transported. Useless like pink lips.

2010
02/05
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New mathematical model shows stupid is highly contagious

Or: Homeopathy is famous because it doesn’t work. The article is interesting, and the gist of it is:

  • people do things they see other people doing
  • people spend more time on medicines that don’t work than medicines that do
  • medicines that don’t work have more time to convince people to try them

Now, completely aside from how horribly depressing that is — and how interesting it is that somebody used the mathematical models used to understand the spread of disease to the spread of crazy — it clarifies and provides a metaphor for a thought that I’ve sort of had knocking around the back of my head for awhile now.

Worldviews (Weltanschauung?  nah.) seem to spread in similar ways to crackpot ideas; I mean, you understand the world in ways that come from the people you interact with. The more strongly that people express a worldview the stronger the effect it has on you. Not necessarily positively, of course. But who is going to believe the most passionately about their WV? People who really need something to believe in. And, of course, if your philosophy is just really fundamentally not working out for you — as, for example, it wouldn’t if you just expect everything to work out because somebody somewhere loves you / hates your coworkers — then you are going to need a philosophy all the more. And especially if it doesn’t lead obviously to gratuitous horrors you are more likely to tell your friends and coworkers (whom your deity/world energy/doctor doesn’t like) that it is the thing that makes the world OK.

So, point is, think carefully when you tell people that ______ is always there for you/around you/touching you with his noodly appendage, because sometimes even an imaginary touch is inappropriate.

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2009
05/04
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Starry McFlamingpantserson, and other remnants.

Well, an hour ago I didn’t know what a snowclone was, but then this guy but now I’m going to share some links with you. I’m going to share some links with you so hard.

Actually, all links to the ADS-L, because this one thread beat my hours of research, or it was the end of it (why are the keys always in the last place I look?) [also, because their icons are meaningless and have no alt-text, the lightbulb with the right arrow seems to mean "next in thread"]
.

OK, first, if you consider “‘McLintock!’ is McNificent!” to be the origin, than this dates back to 1948. I don’t.

Then there’s “Marian McPartland’s Mcmagic”. (1956) That’s better, but still kind of lousy.

There’s a, an, ah, myspace forum dedicated to what people have started “Mc-y-ing”, in honor of greys anatomy. It’s not Xy McYerson, though it is horrible. And it’s from 2007, so by this point we know it’s from between 1956 and 2007.

ah! :

So far I haven’t been able to find anything
earlier than Nov. 1, 2001 — the first appearance of Hottie
McHotterson (on rec.games.video.sony) (hmmm)

OK, even better:

These may have been inspired by Bill Maher, who took to calling Bush
“Drinky McDumbass” as early as 2000 (when his show “Politically
Incorrect” was still on the air).

–Ben Zimmer

That seems about right for the recent surge in them, although I also remember saying it in highschool. Wait, highschool, that means…

Tipsy McStagger from “Flaming Moe’s” (Season 3,
aired Nov 21, 1991). In the episode, a representative from Tipsy
McStagger’s Good Time Drinking and Eating Emporium tries to get the
recipe for the “Flaming Moe” drink from Moe the bartender.

the simpsons. Of course.

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2009
04/26
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Quantum teleportation, shmontum teleportation

Since there has been a lot of work being done over the last few years on quantum computation there have been a lot of articles published along the lines of “Quantum Teleportation is here, but it’s no Star Trek.”

To which I say: Pshah! Emphatically pshah sirs!

Quantum teleportation only bares the slightest resemblance to what we think of as teleportation, I mean, there are no flashing lights! No chance to accidentally turn a man into an inside-out monkey! No levers for intuitive control over the process of recomposing a person atom-by-atom-by-atom-by- ( * 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000ish )! My point being, ladies and gentlemen, don’t worry when you read stories like this one (or this one, etc) where they very clearly say that this technology is impossibly far from transporting humans. It was never designed for that!

One of the biggest problem with QT — related to transporting real people — is that you have to have as many atoms at the end as you start with, exactly as many. And they have to be blank. And you have to “entangle” them with the original person. Which, as far as I know the only way that we’ve got to entangle atoms is to super-freeze them (to pretty close to -459°f) and turn them into a sort of super-sized cloud-atom-thing. That is to say, you have to do that to both groups of atoms, something which I don’t particularly want done to me, thank you very much.

No, I think — and it is very important to remember that I am terribly under-qualified to be even thinking, never mind talking about these things — that it is a much better idea to be exploding people. Because people are just mass and information, and mass is just energy, and information and energy are much easier to transport than mass. Of course, converting people to pure energy will probably require a heck of a lot of power, probably way more than just freezing them to near absolute zero.

But it will be hella flashy.

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2009
02/11
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What Programmers Do

So, what the hell do programmers do, anyway? I’ve noticed that a lot of people think that programming is a crazy obscure art that involves knowing all about 1s and 0s, and since it’s not, but it is really cool and important, I want clear up some common misconceptions that I’ve run across. Since everybody knows that programming is convincing the elves inside your computer to think what you want them to think, you might as well know how it’s done, right?

OK, so, the first common misconception is that programming languages are the ones and zeroes that computers understand, and that programmers write them with near-superhuman understanding. That was true in the late cretaceous period, but now we have real languages.

For example, consider the act of converting english speech into machine code, (the ones and zeros that computers understand) programming how to do that in machine code would be extremely difficult, but this is how you would do it in Python, a modern language:

for each_letter in sentence:
    print binary_code_for[each_letter],

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? If you don’t know the language you probably don’t know exactly what’s going on, but it’s certainly not nearly as rough as hundreds of pages of 1s and 0s. It’s at least obvious that telling the computer that you want it to print the binary code for each letter. That’s real code, it works. (If you don’t believe me, you can view a full working version here.) A large part of being a good coder is making it easy for humans to read what you’ve written, so it’s not even like that’s different to how I should write it for myself.

I think that also gives a bit of an idea of what programmers do all day long: they write hundreds (and thousands) of lines of simple things like that, making them read as much like real english as possible, growing up systems a little bit at a time. Once you’ve got something built and working you can use it in other systems, and that’s why it’s possible for so much progress to happen so quickly. And that’s also why it’s possible for younglings to learn and do amazing things: programming languages are basically just extremely formal english, (or in some cases, limited drawing tools) with magic words that output to the screen or request input or solve impossible problems or any of the variety of other thinks that can be thought. Learning how to program is learning a small number of basic concepts, a slightly larger amount of basic syntax, and then blam! Magic.

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2008
12/01
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Not-so(-super)-secret Project

OK, so in honor of not having written pretty much anything in close to a year (winter, looking back on my past posting habits, seems to be my writing time anyway) I’ll reveal the secret project alluded to in my last post:

Degenerate Forms. An algorithmic poetics. Basically, for my expressive computing class, a couple of guys (paul, brendan, and I) wrote a collection of scripts that grab some text from the internet and arrange it into “Poetry.” (note the capital “p”.) That wiki page is sort-of part of the art, so be careful when reading.

In the “art college” sense, we’re commenting on the semi-relatedness of all things in the news, and their transience. I’m torn about the fact that some of our sources for text are “weird” news, like the yahoo oddities page, although in general the quantity of stuff from that is totally dwarfed by what’s in things like the NYTimes. The other direction we could have gone would be to have used things from project gutenberg and wikisource. That would have given us “prettier” text, especially had we used some of the poetry available. However, given that we are really trying to do something “of the moment,” those don’t really make sense, nor do they fit in with the whole art-college aesthetic. So we stuck to twitter and various news sources.

Anyway, here’s some of the poems generated, (although, if you’ve got the know-how, it’s really better to do it live) let me know what you think.

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2008
11/20
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Super-secret project

A tiny result:

Stopping ax woods on A Snowy Evening

whose woods there are I think I know.
his house is in vie village though;
if will not red me stopping here
To watch hip wooer fill up with pony.
my little horse must think it steep
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between tie zones cod frozen lake
vie darkest evening me tie year.
id hives hip garners bells a shake
To ask id these is pond mistake.
vie only other sound’s vie sweep
me easy wind and downy flake.
tie zoner bsd loudly, dark cod deer.
but I have promiser to jeer,
cod miles to in before I sleds,
cod miles to in afford I sleds.

More info when it’s ready.

Let me know if you think you know what’s going on :)

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2008
10/29
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An introspective update

Since it’s been so long, here’s what i’ve said:

the wordle created for this blog on 10-7-08

the wordle created for this blog on 10-7-08

Created by wordle.com, words’ size is determined by frequncy on my rss feed, so, apparently i do actually care about culture :)

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2008
10/07
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emacs, lisp, php, wordcount, and etc.

Based partially on Steve Yegge’s advice that you should learn your tools, along with an interest in doing some kind of coding even while being busy with school, I’ve been working my way through the emacs manual and the emacs-lisp-intro, which latter is highly recommended.

(As an aside, one thing I’ve been working on has been learning how to make modes and all the things that would go into that, and because of that I was able to “fix” a bug in php-mode, which apparently somebody has found useful and thanked me for. First time ever being thanked for fixing code, let me tell you it was really nice and inspired an extra few hours of learning. What I’m saying is that if you like the work somebody’s doing saying thanks not only makes thme feel good, it also will improve the chances of thme doing further things that will benefit you.)

One direct result of this is that I have written a short count-words-document function. All the hard work was taken care of by `karl’, he wrote the main count-words function as part of the text. But I have started to do a lot of editing of LaTeX text in emacs, so that I don’t have to deal with OOo’s obsessive desire to print my document every time I hit C-p. I can’t figure it out ;)

The wordcount function’s he wrote can count all the words in a region or a buffer, but neither of those are optimal of a LaTeXer, what with all the boilerplate my templates are accumulating. Sure, I could search for the beginning of the document, mark it, and then go to the end and pass the region to the function, but doesn’t that sound like to much work? Well, I realized that since all my templates begin with a “begin{document}” environment, and usually actually a “begin/end{singlespace}” env., that I could write a defun to just automatically deal with that, so voila:

(defun count-words-document (&optional arg begin end)
  "Without ARG, count all the words in the {document} environment
if ARG exists, count words in region."
  (interactive "P\nr")
  (if arg
      (count-words-region (prefix-numeric-value begin)
			  (prefix-numeric-value end))
    (save-excursion
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (if (search-forward "end\{singlespace\}" nil t)
	  (count-words-region (point) (progn
					(search-forward "end\{document\}")
					(goto-char (match-beginning 0))))
	(progn
	  (goto-char (point-min))
	  (if (search-forward "begin\{document\}" nil t)
	      (count-words-region (point) (progn
					    (search-forward "end\{document\}")
					    (goto-char (match-beginning 0))))
	    (count-words-region (point-min) (point-max) t)))))))

That function depends on the `count-words-region’ defun which was written by “karl” and can be downloaded, for convenience with my additional function from here. The count-words-document function if called without an argument (e.g. `M-x count-words-document’) will automatically create a region that begins, in descending order, with `end{singlespace}’, then `begin{document}’, then just the beginning of the buffer. The first two conditions will end the region at an `end{document}’ string, and the beginning of the buffer ends at the end of the buffer. So it has a nice descending order of most logical TeX regions. You can also, if you want pass it any argument (e.g. `C-u M-x count-words-document’) and it will count the words in the current region instead.

This would be nicer if it searched for variables instead of hard-coded regexes, but for now that’s for a v0.2 or something, since I don’t know how to define custom variables yet. Also, I just realized that the documentation is horribly incomplete. Anyway:

To install it, stick it in your load-path (if you haven’t got one set up, adding (setq load-path (cons ".emacs.d" load-path)) to your .emacs file will add `.emacs.d’ to your load path, just make the actual directory [that is to say, `mkdir .emacs.d'] and put the file inside it.) and add (load "wordcount") to your .emacs file somewhere below the load-path edit, and voila.

You could also set it to a shortcut key, for example I have it set to `C-c d’

(global-set-key "\C-cd" 'count-words-document)

`d’ for Document.

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2008
07/08
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code
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