Month: July 2014

Researchers are developing an app for it:

For a paper released earlier this month, adorably entitled “The Shortest Path to Happiness,” [researchers from the University of Turin and Yahoo] asked over 3,000 online users of their site Urbangems.org to decide which of two street scenes from Google Earth was the most beautiful. The researchers then used this data to put together four different routes between London’s Tate Modern and Euston station, and asked 30 people to test and rate them. Each route was chosen by the researchers to display a different quality: one was “beautiful,” another “happy,” a third “quiet” and the last was “short.”  …

In each of these experiments, the team found that the shortest route was often ranked the lowest by users: the quickest path between their two destinations in London, for example, took walkers down busy, car-clogged roads, and crossed Blackfriars Bridge. Much better, many felt, to take a quieter and more scenic path across the pedestrianized Millennium Bridge. If a route is attractive, walkers often don’t even notice that it’s longer.

The endgame:

The plan is to turn all these findings into an app for cities in the US and Europe. It wouldn’t be the first app to take users off the beaten path – Dérive gets you “lost in the city,” while Serendipitor uses the philosophy of, among others, Yoko Ono to “introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route” (oooohkay). But this would be the first app to generate routes based on “quiet, happiness and beauty.”

(Photo of a Berlin street by Steffi Reichert)

Annie Murphy Paul argues that advocates of self-directed learning don’t have a lot of evidence in their corner:

In a paper published in Educational Psychologist last year, Paul A. Kirschner of the Open University of the Netherlands and Jeroen J.G. van Merriënboer of Maastricht University challenge the popular assumption “that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning.” There are three problems with this premise, van Merriënboer and Kirschner write. The first is that novices, by definition, don’t yet know much about the subject they’re learning, and so are ill-equipped to make effective choices about what and how to learn next. The second problem is that learners “often choose what they prefer, but what they prefer is not always what is best for them”—that is, they practice tasks that they enjoy or are already proficient at, instead of tackling the more difficult tasks that would actually enhance their expertise. And third, although learners like having some options, unlimited choices quickly become frustrating—as well as mentally taxing, constraining the very learning such freedom was supposed to liberate.

 

Another grueling weekend in the Middle East, but some relief here at the Dish. Six posts worth revisiting: the perils of auto-correct; the dirty mouths of babes; Edmund White’s brilliant appreciation of friendship; visualizing Debussy; a religious history of the Great War; and an adorable nine-day-old white lion.

The most popular post of the weekend – by a mile – was The Worrying Vacuity Of Hillary Clinton; followed by Why Am I Moving Left?

19 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the read-ons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. One subscriber writes:

Celebrity is confusing. While your public persona seems so confessional, it’s easy to forget that I don’t actually know you. That what I think about you includes an enormous amount of projection. And that you certainly don’t know me. It’s the asymmetry, I think, that is so strange. Your persona speaks to me most days, through your writing, while you have received perhaps 10 emails from me, among god knows how many emails from 30,000 others.

Is it strange for you? It must be. How do you handle it? I hope that people respect your privacy and personal space, but you must have your share of unwanted encounters. Or are you one of the lucky few who is energized by such encounters?

The issue came up last weekend, when my girlfriend introduced me to Provincetown. She knows that I am a Dishhead, and that you are a Provincetownhead. On the ferry from Boston, she teased me about you. Asked me what I would say if we bumped into you. I said that of course we wouldn’t bump into you.

We got off the boat, and you were EVERYWHERE! Turns out it was bear week. Ten million beards, many resembling yours. Made me unreasonably happy to see your gathered tribe. And I see why you love the place itself. We spent all weekend walking, unmolested by celebrity, passing among the dunes from one unexpected oasis to the next, our souls sipping the serenity in each.

Beardless, both of us, yet happy.

May your private oases be safe and bright. May you and your husband take moments to be happy, despite all the troubles of the world.

See you in the morning.

(Photo by Mikael Colville-Anderson.  See the poems it illustrated here.)

Dana Staves considers how reading Virginia Woolf’s diary helped her reconsider the literary giant:

Her final entry is unremarkable. But it’s her final sentences that broke my heart, that has haunted me for months to follow: “And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.”

Sausage and haddock? She’s Virginia Woolf, she terrifies me and astounds me, and I love her, and her final written words to the world of her diary, before she took her own life three weeks later, is about sausage and haddock. The cook in me smirked, the way we smile over a bittersweet memory of loved ones who have passed. After all that, it’s sausage and haddock. It’s life. But the writer in me – the part of me that doesn’t always have food on the brain – stalled out.

We build up authors so that they become epic and mythic, each huddled away on their corners of a literary Mount Olympus, scribbling or typing. The place smells of coffee and books and anxiety. But in the end, they’re people, not gods. They’re people who must eat dinner and fear bombs and attempt to get a handle on cooking sausage and haddock. This is a challenge as big as writing The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway.  Virginia Woolf was epic to me. But she was also just a person. She could no more fix my insecurity than fix her own.

Ben Watts reviews the above short film, Where Do Lilacs Come From, which movingly portrays the perspective of a man with Alzheimer’s:

Writers are often told: “Write what you know”. For Where Do Lilacs Come From, [writer/director Matthew] Thorne did just that, ripping a band-aid off painful true-life events and dramatizing them for the screen. “I had a lot of memories from when I was younger of my dad losing his mother to Alzheimer’s,” Thorne said. “[Those memories] really became the genesis for the film — particularly the pain my dad went through. It was a very strange experience being reintroduced to your Grandmother every day as though she had never met you…You almost start to wonder whether that’s normal. I really wanted to tell a story from her perspective — what it might be like to live in a world where present and past don’t have a clear delineation.” On that front, Thorne excels magnificently, tapping into the dreamlike-quality of memory loss with precision. The extent of Chris’ Alzheimer’s is not apparent until Michael holds up a framed photograph and shows it to his father.

“That’s Mom,” Michael says. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”

“She’s probably in the house,” Chris says.

“No. Mom’s gone now.”

“Oh,” Chris says, pointing to a man in the picture. “Does he know?”

Michael takes a deep breath, trying to keep his composure. “That’s you, Dad.”

More readers keep the conversation going about the merits of New Atheism, sparked by this post. One argues that it’s not Nietzsche who atheists should turn to, but a different German philosopher – Schopenhauer:

All the criticisms leveled against Nietzsche that you have posted are valid.  Nietzsche is too often assigned to atheists because of his famous “God is dead” line.  Nietzsche dismissed the so-called Golden Rule as insipid sentimentalism, as well as Rousseau’s declaration that human empathy proves the goodness of man.  Nietzsche operates outside of what we consider conventional morality, and he makes for an exciting read, but in the end must be rejected by agnostics like myself due to his disdain for the vast majority of humanity, those trapped within slave-morality.

The philosopher I admire is Schopenhauer, especially his notion that compassion is the only good.  Schopenhauer blended Indian philosophy into his belief, that when one exercises their will it leads to suffering.  This is different from Nietzsche’s claim that will should be used to gain power, and that power is only for elite “Supermen” and whatever may be the lot for the rest of humanity does not matter.  (Also note that Nietzsche was one of histories great misogynists, and seemed to truly loathe women.)

The atheist/agnostic would be better served by association with Schopenhauer than Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is to be admired as a writer and a thinker, but not as a guide to New Atheism.

Another rejects the claim from a previous reader that since “the religion believed and practiced by the vast majority of the religious” isn’t the sophisticated theism of, say, David Bentley Hart, the New Atheists have a point:

I’ve never understood why this is the criteria for judging religion’s validity.

Is this criteria applied to anything else? Is philosophy bunk because most people who understand themselves to be “selves” couldn’t tell you the first thing about the cogito?  Are social theories about race to be dismissed because most of us are oblivious to them–or aware of them incorrectly? Of course not. But the sadly all too human behavior and misunderstandings of those that practice religion are regularly pointed to as an excuse to be incurious about its deeper possibilities. Those intellectually curious who want to know about philosophy or race or anything else don’t ask the general populace but turn to the sharpest, most cogent thinkers on the subject. What is so dangerous about doing the same with religion?

Another reader adds that there’s “no reason to be so tentative regarding the case for a secular basis of ethics”:

There are plenty of sophisticated defenses of “secular” ethics. We can look at Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, or Tim Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other, or Christine Korsgaard’s Sources of Normativity, or Michael Huemer’s Ethical Intuitionism, or David Enoch’s Taking Morality Seriously, or dozens of other books. (Indeed, from the survey information we have (as found here) moral realism and atheism are both favored positions among academic philosophers.) What’s always so odd to me is the two-pronged attack made by those who insist on the inadequacy of a secular account of morality: on the one hand, they contend that secular ethics doesn’t address various thorny metaphysical and epistemological issues. And yet, when presented with the existence of such sophisticated works that plainly do address such issues, they dismiss the works as being too obscure and complicated — too academic if you will. Well, you can’t have it both ways. If you want a robust and sophisticated defense of secular morality, then you might need to read something a little more dense than a book about atheism designed to be accessible to a popular audience.

Previous reader responses here. Meanwhile, other readers respond to Michael Robbins’ letter to the Dish:

Michael Robbins’ latest defense of his essay review of Spencer’s book, which you posted, conveniently skips past a colossal point that one of your readers quite cogently articulated in dissent:

The religious intelligentsia want to embrace the vast majority of Christians (who believe nothing like they do), as part of their faith, and at the same time decry atheists who focus on that vast majority as failing to engage “true” Christianity and the deep, meaningful arguments for the faith.

Robbins goes on to prove your reader right when he, like John Haught and David Bentley Hart and other “Sophisticated Theologians”, makes the boring mistake of saying that “religious fundamentalism is a soft target.”  Is it really that soft when almost half of America believes that God created the world in its current form according to Genesis?  Is it really?

Another:

Dammit.  I never said anything, positive or negative, about the Hart quote other than Robbins wanted us to focus on it. More to the point: When Michael Robbins writes “Christians have recognized the allegorical nature of these accounts since the very beginnings of Christianity”, or “it’s not God, at least not God as conceived by a single one of the major theistic traditions on the planet”, he’s ignoring the belief of most Christians in the US and elsewhere.  To be clear, most living Christians do not recognize the allegorical nature of these accounts (a statement easily proven).

When Robbins says, “I had assumed it was obvious that Origen and Augustine would hardly have taken the trouble to deny literalist readings of the Bible if such readings did not exist” he’s faking left and going right. Reading the Bible literally came after the Reformation (a fact Robbins flags in his article “He Is Who Is“).  And while I am insufficiently educated to speak to Origen, I’m happy to go head-to-head on Augustine: $50 for every place Augustine denies literalist readings of the Bible vs. every place Augustine did not.  For example, did Augustine believe in a literal Adam and Eve and original sin?  (Yes.)  Does evolutionary theory destroy both?  (Yes.)  Will I make good money if Robbins takes me up on my offer?  (Yes.)

“Young-earth creationism” is “of course” not based on the Bible.  He seriously said that.  Robbins’ use of the phrase “of course” illustrates a startling ignorance of the mass of Christianity and their scriptural exegesis.  Apparently Ken Ham and Bill Nye’s debate on a 6,000 year-old earth missed the point – nobody watched it.

OK, enough whining, to the heart: Michael Robbins continues to miss the point.

But the New Atheists did not write books that simply attacked creationism. They wrote books that purport to challenge theistic belief as such. They therefore have a responsibility to address the best cases for God, not the dullest.

They wrote books to challenge the theistic belief … of the vast majority of  Christians.  The audience that believes Noah stuffed 9 million unique species on a boat, and the kangaroos hopped from Mount Ararat  to Australia without leaving a single skeleton. That doesn’t require challenging the best cases for God, that requires pointing out that 18 million animals would require a lot of food, produce a lot of waste, and the wolves would probably eat the rabbits.  If the target audience doesn’t care (or understand), the best cases, why should atheists focus on them?

Yes “religious fundamentalism” is a soft target – but it is the important target, and the target on which atheists should focus. If Robbins disagrees, he needs to make the argument that attacking the best cases for God is worth doing, not that it’s the “right” thing to do.

Another piles on:

I’ve found Michael Robbins essay and response both unconvincing. The “New Atheists should be more like Old Atheists,” trope aside, there are other tropes I saw in Robbins’ response. Let’s play spot the trope!

But the New Atheists did not write books that simply attacked creationism. They wrote books that purport to challenge theistic belief as such. They therefore have a responsibility to address the best cases for God, not the dullest. When Dennett asks if super-God created God, and if super-duper-God created super-God, he is simply revealing a lack of acquaintance with the intellectual traditions of the major religions. If you want to argue against something, you have to understand what you’re arguing against. That’s axiomatic.

I would say there are two standard tropes in here. First is the atheists don’t address “the best cases for God.” As far as I can tell atheists always deal with the argument for God being made. Whenever I see that phrase I’m reminded of the practice of goal-post shifting. Often when an atheist addresses a “case for God” they’re told that they haven’t addressed the “best case for God.” Which makes me wonder, why don’t proponents of theism use the “best case for God?” Maybe Robbins should check out Jerry Coyne’s website (not blog) Why Evolution is True; he has addressed various “best cases for God.” Most recently he covered David Bentley Harts’ latest book and found that that “best case for God” was a series of non-sequiturs. X exists therefore God is hardly a convincing argument.

The second I noticed has already been addressed through the Courtier’s Reply. I don’t need to spend several years studying fashion to point out someone’s naked just as I don’t have to spend several years studying theology to point out arguments for theism are not rational.

Another thing, this sentence: “Some atheists believe that their faith in scientific naturalism suffices to disprove the existence of God, for instance.” Speaking of caricatures … I will admit that there may be atheists like this but I know of no atheists who make arguments like that. Science simply eliminates various things from various gods portfolios and finds natural explanations. Germ theory of disease is one example. Do bacteria and viruses disprove God? Of course not, it simply means that God is not needed for people to get sick.

The atheists I know are atheist because they found the argument for theism unconvincing. Personally I’ve always found evidence for theism lacking and the philosophical arguments for theism either irrational or creating an irrelevant deity whose existence is identical to it’s nonexistence. Robbins should check out QualiaSoup’s three–part series on morality without God if he wants to some idea of what he’s arguing against.

[snark] Oh wait, stuff like that can’t exist because of the intellectual shallowness of atheists. [/snark]

I love my family and friends. I help others because it is right. I share what pleasure I have with the people I care about. I celebrate life as best I can and share what joy in life as best I can, because this is all we get. There’s no way I’m going to celebrate life any less just because someone told me I should be sad about the death of God.