Month: February 2014

Simon Price explains why he “blaspheme[s] freely, with relish and glee”:

Objections to my fondness for blasphemy usually fall into three categories. First is the accusation of hypocrisy. “If you’re an atheist,” comes the question, “why do you even use those words?” My answer is that I was reared in an Anglican culture, which instilled in me uncountable hang-ups, false hopes and arbitrary feelings of guilt. Blaspheming, for anyone who had their young mind mangled by religion, is not merely a right – it’s a solemn duty.

The second, especially in these post-Fatwa, post-Danish-cartoon times, is the insinuation of cowardice. Why, I’m asked, do I not speak profanities pertaining to other religions? Firstly because it would sound desperately put on and contrived, like Basil Fawlty muttering, “Oh, Buddha”. Secondly, Christianity programmed me with its “language”, a rich set of cultural references in which I’m fluent. We all speak, for example, of the “road to Damascus moment”, or predict that “so-and-so will get crucified”. These phrases belong to the unbeliever as much as the believer. …

The third is the charge of impoliteness. I’m told I must always consider the sensitivities of the faithful, who shudder at sacrilegious speech. I disagree. Those who were indoctrinated alongside me, but bought into it for life, have made their choice about what to do with all that baggage. And I’ve made mine.

While reading Sam Harris and his fellow New Atheists, Jonathan Haidt noticed that their books “used rhetorical structures suggesting certainty far more often than I was used to in scientific writing – words such as ‘always’ and ‘never,’ as well as phrases such as ‘there is no doubt that…’ and ‘clearly we must…'” So he decided to do a little experiment:

I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind. (More details about the analysis can be found here.)

To provide an additional standard of comparison, I also analyzed books by three right wing radio and television stars whose reasoning style is not generally regarded as scientific. I analyzed Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil, and Anne Coulter’s Treason. (I chose the book for each author that had received the most comments on Amazon.) As you can see in the graph, the New Atheists win the “certainty” competition. Of the 75,000 words in The End of Faith, 2.24% of them connote or are associated with certainty.

Wray Herbert reviews Thomas Suddendorf’s The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals. The most important distinction between man and beast:

Suddendorf’s main idea is that we humans are capable of cognitive feats to which no other animal—not even our impressive cousin the ape—comes close. We are able to imagine endless situations, to create scenarios and narratives about distant places, including the past and future. And, equally important, we have an insatiable drive to share those imaginings with other scenario-building minds. Our uniqueness, the author argues, rests on these two fundamental traits, but plays out in various domains of the human mind.

Language is one of those domains. A lot has been written about the abilities of other species to communicate, and those skills are indeed impressive. Bees signal the whereabouts of food, and birds have elaborate courtship dances. My dog clearly (and effectively) signals that it’s dinnertime by staring. But none of this adds up to language—not as I illustrated it above. Even humpback whales, with their very large brains, show only a narrow repertoire of communication skills, devoid of the flexibility and generative power that allow us to utter and comprehend novel expressions. Suddendorf systematically dismantles the claims of other species on language, arguing that even the great apes—the ones we have spent years trying to teach our language—fall far short of full-fledged language. What’s lacking, in the end, is the motivation to create symbols and grammar to share what’s on their minds.

Commenting on Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, Popova considers the composer’s tendency to plagiarize from soloists in his orchestra “without credit, creative or financial, to the originators”:

[Music writer and historian Stanley] Dance called him “the greatest innovator in his field, and yet paradoxically a conservative, one who built new things on the best of the old.” It was, no doubt, a compliment on the mastery with which Ellington built on the legacy of jazz, not a dig on his unabashed creative borrowing that bled into plagiarism. And therein lies another eternal human paradox that Ellington embodied: Is it possible to be both a plagiarist and an innovator? Ellington lived the answer with remarkable aplomb.

But the real question, of course, isn’t whether creativity is combinatorial and based on the assemblage of existing materials — it is. What Ellington did was simply follow the fundamental impetus of the creative spirit to combine and recombine old ideas into new ones. How he did it, however, was a failure of creative integrity. Attribution matters, however high up the genius food chain one may be.

Previous Dish on Ellington here and here.

In an excerpt from Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, Leah Vincent describes her decision to become a prostitute:

The choice I made that morning felt inevitable. Girls who left Yeshivish life always became sluts and whores. This had been taught to me all of my life. I could never turn into a healthy irreligious woman. I now saw that this was not because of some divine punishment— no. It was because the journey out of the cloistered community I had been raised in was too difficult. The distance from modest girl to free woman could not be traversed. I would never have the confidence of a woman who’d received parental love regardless of her lifestyle choices. I would never relate to men the way a woman who had safely explored her sexuality in high school or college could. I would be stranded in black space between the world I came from and the world I wanted to enter, always falling short, always hurt, always failing. I might as well give up clawing away in the direction of a future that would never be mine. I might as well embrace my brokenness. I might as well wield it like a sword. I would not fall into the prophecy of doom; I would jump into it, feet first. I would be a smashing success at being bad.

Having rejected the laws of my upbringing, I had adopted few new morals. Sex was not sacred to me. And most importantly, I was good at it. My curves grabbed men’s attention, their interest fueled my confidence, and in the act, my desperation to please left my lovers more than satisfied. I was clueless at relationships but fantastic at attracting eager men and thrilling them that first, magical time. I might as well pursue my strength, I figured. I did not pause over the dangers of prostitution. I did not worry about disease. The [pelvic inflammatory disease] had probably left my insides dead. I felt I had nothing to lose.

Robert Berry describes Black Midi, which is known “for the incredible density of notes crammed onto [songs’] scores”:

Artists use cheap software like Synthesia, intended as a vaguely Guitar Hero-ish piano tuition aid, as a means of visualising their pieces for YouTube consumption. Notes rain down on the piano keyboard like a tropical storm with some pieces averaging more than 60,000 notes a second, note counts in the millions – even billions – over the course of a few minutes. At moments of the most extreme densities, the system’s ability to represent the information it is being fed breaks down and the sound erupts into a scree of digital distortion. There is a reason why so many ‘blackers’ refer to their tunes as “impossible music”.

When I described the Black Midi stuff I’d heard to [electronic artist] Holly Herndon, she was apt to liken it to the early twentieth century cluster chords of Charles Ives, or to think of it as a kind of absurdist critique – whether deliberate or not – of the extremes of virtuosity demanded by the ‘new complexity’ music of composers like Brian Ferneyhough. … As I plunged through the online rabbit hole of Black Midi wikis and YouTube channels, with their frenzied cover versions of classic video game soundtracks, their hyperbolic boasts of lavish cpu- busting note densities; I heard something at once comfortingly alien and peculiarly childlike.

(Video: “Bad Apple” by TheSuperMarioBros2)

Roberto A. Ferdman and Ritchie King describe how they created the above Beer Index:

Numbeo, a crowd-sourced database of the price of goods around the world, maintains a comprehensive list of the average price of a domestic draft beer in different countries. And the International Labor Organization (ILO) maintains a vast library of minimum monthly wage data. So we combined the two—into a beer indicator, of sorts.

By dividing the average price a local has to pay to get a beer by the hourly minimum wage (assuming a 40-hour work week) a person makes in each country, we were able to approximate how long it takes someone making the minimum wage to earn enough to buy a brew at a local bar. The Economist did something similar back in 2012, but used countries’ median wages, and only included 27 countries. This one is a bit more comprehensive (and a bit more about the people who make the least.)