Thanks to Kate and Hannah, here’s a link to a detailed (and perhaps more than usually accurate) survey of religious belief in the US. The detailed tables are fascinating. One example: with respect to educational attainment, broad belief in God went from 82% for “High school or less” to 73% for “Post graduate”. However absolute certainty about God went from 72% to 53%. (Of course as Flanagan points out, many believers don’t actually care very much about whether their belief is well grounded, or strongly held, or even if it’s true….)
Heading home
It’s just after dawn here in Carmel Valley, CA. A cold night (around 30F), and a beautiful clear morning. Since Merry’s parents have sold the house and are moving soon, this will be my final Carmel Valley morning. We’re heading up to Santa Cruz (where Chris went to school at UCSC), then over 17 to San Jose to get a flight back to Boston. And (sigh) it looks as if the plane (AA 757) is going to be 100% full….
CD of the week: The Who Live at Leeds: Deluxe Edition
I was hunting through the bazillion tracks on my iPod looking for something, and I stumbled on Magic Bus by The Who. One thing led to another… I found myself with a long drive through holiday traffic, and I had a new iTrip which allowed me to listen to the iPod though the car radio, so I cued up the incomparable deluxe edition of Live at Leeds and let it rip.
I bought the original, single LP version of the album many moons ago when I was still a student. Of course the new version includes a complete live performance of Tommy, as well as several additional classic Who tracks. Definitely one of the great live albums, right up there with Live/Dead, disc 1 of Umma-Gumma, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, and Wheels of Fire.
Doxastic voluntarism
Thought for the day: Do humans have direct voluntary control over their beliefs? Per Michael Sudduth: “This is the so-called doxastic voluntarism thesis. According to this view, a cognitive attitude (belief, disbelief, or withholding of belief) is justified only if the cognitive attitude is within our direct voluntary control. However, there is good reason to suppose that this thesis is false…” This is intriguing: I had always assumed that we do not have voluntary control over our beliefs, and I was surprised to find the idea that we do was sufficiently respectable that it had acquired an impressively polysyllabic name….
I came across the term while reading a review by Jeff Wisdom of Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them. I bought the book this morning, anticipating a well-reasoned approach to reconciling humanistic expectations with scientific realities. Like Jeff, I have been disappointed that Flanagan has (so far) failed to address the deeper objections to his, fairly orthodox, views. Now I happen to share most of Flanagan’s ideas (though not his Buddhism), but this doesn’t mean that there are no arguments to be made. Oh well; even if it isn’t a rigorous treatment of the subject, it should be an enjoyable read on my flight back to Boston on Monday.
Tedium is…
Tedium is installing Windows XP SP2 over a dial-up link, on a machine that’s not up-to-date with security patches. Updating the Software Update libraries took an hour; downloading SP2 took five hours (overnight). Having 6 Mb/s cable modem service at home has spoiled me….
Musings on standards
I’ve been involved in standards work since the late 1970s, and I’ve always viewed the primary objective as interoperability. Interoperability demands unambiguous specifications (as much as humanly possible) and verifiable conformance – preferably machine-verifiable. A standards body creates a spec and defines conformance criteria; people implement that spec and test their implementations for conformance. That’s it. (I like to think in OO terms: a standard is an object with one method, conforms(), which takes an implementation and returns
About a year ago, this came up in a certain web services group: there was a great flurry of activity to try to develop glossary entries for the terms synchronous and asynchronous, even though the terms were not used in the standard. Everybody had their own pet definition, usually in terms of some (irrelevant) implementation behaviour. I tried to apply my usual thinking to the issue, and I got stuck. I generally find that this is a good reason not to act. (Of course such self-restraint is hard for a standards group: like fishes, lack of forward movement usually presages death….)
"Even a three-year old needs to be killed"
The Guardian has a report on an incident in which an Israeli officer emptied his automatic rifle into a wounded thirteen-year-old girl. His explanation (over the radio): “This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.”
Economic `Armageddon' predicted; film at 11
Back on November 5th I blogged about the likely consequences of the “perfect storm” of the trade deficit, budget deficit, and oil prices, particularly the collapse of the dollar. Others have the same idea. In today’s Boston Herald, Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, waxed apocalyptic: “To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day. That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world’s net savings.” Roach predicts a major slump, with a massive wave of bankruptcies.
Interestingly, the article concludes: “But […] there may be an alternative scenario to Roach’s. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today’s consumer debts in real terms. Inflation of 7 percent a year halves “real” values in a decade. It may be the only way out of the trap. Higher interest rates, or higher inflation: Either way, the biggest losers will be long-term lenders at fixed interest rates.”. And this is exactly the “stagflationary” scenario that I predicted.
(Via Boing Boing.)
West coast travel
A synopsis of the last few days…. On Friday we flew from Boston to Seattle for a weekend with Chris and Celeste. On Saturday we drove down to Renton to ride the Spirit of Washington train over to the Columbia Winery for lunch. Then on Sunday we went up to the Joe Bar for coffee, swung by the cathedral to meet folks, and then after lunch went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the stunning exhibition on Spain in the Age of Exploration. We would have gone on to look at the other exhibitions in the museum, but a fire alarm put paid to that. (This is getting to be a habit.)
On Monday morning we flew down from Seattle to San Jose. The plan was that we should get to SJC around 10:30; then Merry would meet up with her parents and drive down to Carmel Valley, while I picked up a rental car and head up to Sun’s Menlo Park campus for an important meeting. Initially things went thoroughly pear-shaped. First, we got a phone call from our alarm service saying that the burglar alarm had gone off, and that the police had been dispatched. Then Alaska Air delayed our flight from 8:14 to 9:35. (At least that gave me time to talk to the Brookline police and confirm that everything seemed to be OK at home.) The flight down the coast was OK, although the clouds obscured Mount St. Helens, and it was rather bumpy. And then when we reached San Jose the rendezvous with Merry’s parents didn’t work as planned. AARGH!! But eventually everything was sorted out, and I was able to phone in to the first 30 minutes of the meeting while driving up 101; the rest of the meeting went just fine.
Americans, evolution, religion, and post-modernism
During the recent US election campaign, the issue of American’s attitudes towards evolution popped up again. It’s usually presented as “X million Americans don’t believe in evolution…”, with the corollary at election time “…and they all vote Republican”. As I was dozing on the flight from Boston to Seattle on Friday, I found myself musing about this “fact” in various ways.
- Do non-evolutionists get flu shots? After all, they don’t believe in the science that underlies the development of flu vaccines, and some of them (in Kansas) clearly don’t want their children growing up with the kind of education that would equip them to work on new vaccines.
- How do Biblical inerrantists pick and choose those bits of the Bible they’ll use and those bits they’ll ignore? There are so many bits of blatantly allegorical and magical thinking, not to mention contradictions galore. Does consistency actually matter? If not, why not? Etcetera.
- Why should I worry about all of this? Things like belief in quaint creation myths, or circumcision, or not eating meat on Fridays, are all just tribal membership memes, ways of identifying that you are a member of a group in a way that is relatively resistant to mixing or diaspora. True… but it becomes important when people seek to impose it on others, whether it be banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas or orthodox Jews stoning tour buses in Jerusalem on Shabbat.
After all this fact-free speculation, it was nice to be proved wrong… or at least to get a chance to appreciate the true complexity of the situation. Over at People for the American Way there’s a fascinating report on Evolution and Creationism in Public Education [PDF format]. It’s based on a 1999 survey of 1,500 people. Among the more intriguing findings is the fact that for many people the inclusion of creationism in schools is based not on their religious beliefs, but on what the report calls a “Post Modernist” perspective.
A second important contextual point is what we term the “post-modernist” influence. For about a third of Americans, their fundamentalist religious beliefs drive their support for including Creationism in the public school curriculum. However, for most Americans who would like to see some mention of God or a Divine role in the development of humans, along with the teaching of Evolution, it is not primarily religion behind their opinions. It is much more of what can be called a Post Modernist perspective (a “Hey, you never know” mentality). This perspective is characterized by a wide tolerance for many different beliefs, since no single belief is seen as the final and complete answer to any issue. Also, many parents want their children to be exposed to a wide range of views. Their reasoning is, “our kids should be given enough information so, when they grow up, they can make up their own minds.”
Of course this meant that the vast majority of people were opposed to the Kansas evolution decision because it reduced the “wide range of views” that kids would be exposed to. And as one would expect, support for creationism and opposition to evolution were generally linked with poor education and based on ignorance of the ideas involved. Ironically, people were far more confident in the “proven” status of the Theory of Relativity than of Evolution. The basis for such a belief seems hard to understand….