I may think I’m a person who does the right thing if I don’t cheat on my taxes, am never mean to my friends and try to help them, and try to spend some time donating or volunteering for a good cause.

To be morally good (or good at anything really) this is a very low standard. Example:

Say you come across a panhandler on the street. Do you:

1. Give them money and walk on, your conscience relieved?
2. Ignore them, knowing that giving them money would not be solving the problem and might even encourage any problems they have (substance abuse, etc.)?

The intellectual moralists are going to say, well of course, option 2; the gut moralists (for lack of a better term) are going to go for option 1. Since we know that option 1 is incorrect (assuming it’s ineffective), we might say, OK, we’re done, door 2 was the better door.

But have you really done the right thing to see someone in need and ignore them? Another example:

You’re a teacher in a failing school. While you did pretty well in teacher’s college, and have come up with good lesson plans, your students are rowdy, unresponsive, and aren’t learning. Do you:

1. Keep on teaching, hoping that maybe one or two people pick up the material?
2. Give up, realizing that your effort will not help the students?

It’s pretty obvious that option 1 is, frankly, a waste of resources (in this case, your resources); you can continue on in the noble delusion that you’re a soldier in a lost cause, but once again, you’re satisfying your gut morality while failing to do anything to answer your brain and common sense.

It’s pretty obvious that option 2 is useless.

—

—

Hopefully the armchair quarterbacks in you are reading this and shouting at me, “Option 3, Option 3!” because it’s clear that if people distill their values down to a set of binary choices, and give up on the responsibility to seek out better answers, then they are being morally irresponsible.

I do it, though.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about how option 2 is inadequate, but frankly: I often ignore that feeling. I–maybe we all–need to set the bar higher for myself. I need to engage myself to find the best answers I can, using my resources.

So that’s part one: Being binary does not equal doing the right thing.

• When two people disagree on politics (liberals vs. conservatives), is it possible that they are engaging in binarism?
• Vaguely related and funny: Because They All Suck

The last time we discussed this, the subject was the problem of suffering on earth. This time, we will address the question of science and religion.

Science Again!
The modern worldview is largely shaped by the great scientific discoveries of amazing thinkers like Einstein and Darwin. People like these giants have revolutionized the very way we think about the world, and because of some of these discoveries, many people have been led to think that God is no longer relevant in that world.

Let’s figure out why. Why should it be true that if Darwin says that we evolved from fish, and Hubble et al. have determined that the world expanded from a single point, that there cannot be Christianity?

1. Christianity contains within it the idea of miracles; events that defy common explanation. People being consumed by fire, resurrections, that sort of thing.
2. Christianity also contains within it the idea of God as creator; it claims that all things came from God. Science has no evidence that demands that there be a God at all.
3. Finally, Christianity also has ideas about the nature of humanity (the world was created in 6 days, humans were created and not evolved) that appear to flatly contradict what science has determined.

We will begin first by addressing why all these objections are relevant, and then determine how to repair Christianity so it no longer has such difficulties.

Where these objections come from.

Science is mainly an obstacle to religion because insofar as it presents an alternative to religion. But this, in turn, is only an obstacle if a religion must be believable to scientifically minded beings.

That is to say: God may not even care if you or I acknowledge his existence. It only makes sense to study scientific objections if God was trying to make the argument for his existence to us. If God didn’t care if we believed in his existence, there would be no need for him to create a world

This line of thinking, while logical, exposes a major flaw in Christianity or any theistic religion; why should it be necessary for any being of divine power to have to convince us of their existence at all? This suggests two implications:

1. God has limited his power so that he cannot simply will us to think things.
2. God is, nonetheless, interested in convincing us of his existence.

If one buys the freedom argument, this is perhaps a reasonable hypothesis. However, our religion would choose to strike certain ideas of omnipotence, free will, and good:

1. Free will (unrestrained by God), is a higher good than enforced good. (option 1)
2. God can create a being whose will is unconstrained by God, or not enforce this restraint to make the being good (even though good is important to God) (option 2)

The other side of the argument.

The other half of this is the argument of an a-theist; science and rationality simply leave no room for a God to need to exist. It is simpler, argues the scientist, that the world is self-contained existence.

Under what circumstances would God create a world that allows us to ignore his existence?

[originally started January 20, 2006, 00:22]

• Why should there be a hell?
• Why should bad things (hell, sickness, etc.) happen to people who are good?

While many people have raised and tried to answer these objections, let’s take this in a bit of a different direction. If these are legitimate objections to Christianity (and let’s assume they are),

why not redesign Christianity to remove those objections?

Well, here goes.
We’ll start with suffering. Assume the following postulates are true:

1. God, the creator of the universe, does not want human beings to suffer.
2. God has the power to do anything he so chooses–he is omnipotent.

The answer to this problem is absurdly simple. Since God can do anything He wants, He can simply will that humans are in a world where they do not suffer. All the things that cause suffering in this world–tsunamis, torturers, earthquakes, etc.–would simply vanish, and be removed.

Let’s look at possible objections to this amendment and responses. If any of these holds up, we’ll need our new, more perfect world to address the symptoms without causing more suffering.

1. Suffering is necessary for human growth. (the it’s good for you theory)
2. Human suffering is caused by the choices of humans, not God; God gives humans free will and that is why they suffer. (the it’s your fault theory)
3. Without suffering, there would be no understanding of pleasure or happiness.
4. It’s not possible to make this change because the initial postulates are incorrect. Either a) God wants us to suffer, or b) God does not have the power to change our suffering.

As an introduction, we’ll look at all of these before attempting to redefine Christianity.

1. Suffering is necessary for human growth.

The basic premise is that human beings were meant to experience difficulty in life because it challenges them to be better people. Humans even subject themselves to such hardship voluntarily, so it’s not entirely out of the question to imagine that God might choose the same.

The questions we must ask are: First, why can’t we be as good as we can be without the use of hardship; and second, will we really be able to account for everything that happens to us as something meant for us to grow?

a) The first question is pretty easy to answer, from an intuitive perspective. The army puts its soliders through basic training; colleges put premeds through hell; parents don’t give their kids everything they want; sometimes we even voluntarily endure suffering. So we can be reasonably sure that hardship can be a good thing for growth.

b) The second question–is everything really going to make us grow–is an obvious objection. Why should hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have never heard of God, be swept off the face of the earth? Instantaneous death does not leave much room for personal growth.

Sometimes hardship can offer valuable life lessons, however most of us would agree that, if we were benevolent Gods, we would control the suffering and limit it, much like parents don’t discipline their kids in ways that are permanent (i.e. kill them). Getting arrested for stealing would be ok; a hurricane killing millions without warning wouldn’t be permitted by our new God.

2. Human suffering is caused by the choices of humans, not God; God gives humans free will and that is why they suffer.

This is also a legitimate explanation, and it has some grounding in the Adam and Eve story. However, as in argument 1, it ignores the obvious counterexamples: If a murderer kills an innocent man, why should the innocent man suffer? If a natural disaster strikes, how could one say the victims are responsible and not be considered a lunatic?

In fact, to legitimately use this argument, one must take it farther. Not only are humans liberated, to do as they please; but further, they are put in a liberated world, where natural laws are free to act as arbitrarily as they wish. The question to ask if we embrace this theory is this: Why would God release himself from control of the natural world?

Any world that exists as different from God begs this question.

3. Without suffering, there would be no understanding of pleasure or happiness.

This is a question that involves a bit of psychology. What is happiness? We could probably call it a mental experience that the mind wishes to remain in.

If we as humans were always in a state that we wished to remain in, we would never have a desire to do anything–an Eden-like situation. While this generally kills all ambition and growth, in a perfect state, wouldn’t both be unnecessary?

4. God wants us to suffer or doesn’t have the power to stop it.

One way of looking at this situation is by arguing that suffering simply isn’t that important. Perhaps, as humans, the suffering we can experience is minuscule in perspective. This doesn’t offer much, if any, solace, to someone who experiences disproportionate grief of any kind; but why should the suffering we experience be the worst possible, just because we can’t imagine something that makes it look pleasant in comparison?

Reconstruction

There are three primary paths by which, we, as God, could make a world without the things to which we as humans object.

1. A world with sentient beings who do not suffer (arbitrarily)
2. A world like ours, but with more divine intervention
3. No world

1. SuperJust World

If we make a world with sentient beings who do not suffer, then we can presume that we cannot inflict suffering to make them change. We would then potentially have beings who do not develop, or beings who have only rewards and no punishment. (Is the absence of reward the same as punishment?)

If we assume there is no arbitrary suffering, then we have a world where a being can succeed by being perfectly rational. (“I do X because God gives reward Y.”) This would be a good time to bring up one of the unsaid assumptions that underlies the writing so far–the distinction between rational morality and developed morality.

As human beings, we have a sense that we do certain things not because they are rational, but because they are right (whatever that means). If we actually believe that there is a difference (Kant would), then having a world that is perfectly rational prevents us from ever knowing whether a person has a developed morality or is simply a rational sociopath.

Does total rationality lack some element of humanity? (Is there some element inside us which judges things as good or bad without using logic, and is it key to our humanness?) This question is one we should answer before we can accept the Infinitely Just World, but it reflects in a titillating but incomplete manner, on the difference (or similarity) between us and robots.

I could create Infinitely Just World now, simply by creating an electronic simulation that has rules and organisms that follow those rules or pay consequences. That we find that unsatisfying is either a result of: having made a machine (humans) that is too complicated for us to be disappointed by, or by a fundamental difference between a human and an algorithmic being. But, to understand whether or not a Just World would work, we need to know what that difference is.

And we also need to know what good it is to create humanity in other beings in the first place.

And why we would want to develop them or have them do the right thing on their own in the first place.

2. Sorta Just World

This argument is a bit of a cop-out, so I won’t press it. But it raises all the questions of Unjust World (to a lesser degree) and all the questions of SuperJust World (to a lesser degree)

3. No World?

[originally started January 19, 2006, 23:58]

Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).

Not necessarily. A recent slate article examines the discrepancy between black and white spending on “visible goods” (like fancy clothes, luxury car, etc). The proposed explanation is that black people tend to live in neighborhoods of other black people of relatively similar income levels (compared to that of white people). The increased spending on visible goods has nothing to do with race, but simply a result of increased tendency for “signaling”. The net result of “signaling” is that more money is spent on “visible goods” and less is spent on health care and education.

Does this mean that equality is bad? Probably not, however it certainly means there are significant unintended consequences that are highly unintuitive.

I recently had a visit from a friend who was going through a difficult time, with both a career change and personal problems. Through watching him over the few weeks he was here, I observed that he became deeply involved in the teachings of Buddhism, and absorbed information from a tremendous amount of books, analyzing his condition and thinking about how to change it.

It’s a simple observation: When times are hard, we work to change them. We become more observant, we are more willing to try things to get out of our condition.

When we aren’t suffering, we forget to look around us and find ways to improve our lives, or fix things that are currently wrong.

The lesson from this:

The most important time to think about where we are in our lives is not when our lives are going badly, but when they are going well, because that is the time we are most likely to forget.

2) As a result of the societal illusion of objectivity, people can be fooled into believing that news is objective, thus causing them to think in the way the reporter thinks. But much worse than that, people may assume this way of thinking is objective.

Humans have opinions. Trying to judge the world critically and objectively is good. Pretending that one can throw away their biases when doing so for others is dishonesty.

A common refutation of this formulation of subjective truth is, loosely constructed, as follows:

1. Someone who believes knowledge is subjective claims there is no absolute truth.
2. This claim is a form of absolute truth.
3. Therefore, the person who supports subjective truth contradicts themselves.

(This is not the actual (or even logical) argument, but the framework is the same.) Essentially, the goal is typically to derive a violation of the idea of non-contradiction; that an idea P and not P cannot both be.

The difficulty, for a true relativist, is that the language in which one construct ideas–the playing field on which objective and subjective philosophers play–is fundamentally objective. A relativist, for example, does not claim there is no absolute truth; for to do so would be to venture outside the bounds of relativism. The idea that is in play here does not go down easily in words–”I think subjective truth is an interesting idea,” “I do not claim the existence of an objective truth” come to mind.

English is quite capable of expressing preference–the idea that “the theory of gravity is preferable to me in that I assert it to describe some objective reality” is shortened to “I believe in the theory of gravity.” We can choose to agree or disagree quite well with English; we can construct a verbal model of the world and claim it to be true (like the theory of gravity).

But the possibility of expressing something which is not a preference or an assertion is, given our tools, not efficient. Perhaps it can be constructed through analogy: (unrelated: no spoilers, this is the start of the book)

In Crime and Punishment, Rashkolnikov, the protagonist of the story, begins by murdering an old lady and taking her money, believing he will benefit society. There is no Rashkolnikov person in real life, so to claim that it means anything to say “Rashkolnikov lived in such and such a house” is, in a way, absurd. Nevertheless we can say it.

Is this statement true or false? It is not, in the traditional sense of the word, false; there is no Rashkolnikov to not live in the house (as opposed to having actual objects to work with, for example “last year the LA Lakers won the World Series”; where we know both the Lakers and the Series exist and can thus prove the statement false). We might as well have claimed a Zort is not a Pagromiter. Nevertheless the statement “Rashkolnikov lived in such and such a house” is somehow meriting consideration and not pointless.

We could argue, perhaps, that what we really mean to say is that “In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, he describes a character, Rashkolnikov, who lived in such and such a house” and thus claim that is what we meant to say. However, for this to work, we must remember that we did not say “Rashkolnikov lived in such and such a house” first; Dostoevsky did. This does not sink the argument by itself; we could argue that Dostoevsky, in writing his work, produced a factual statement like this:

In a story I wrote called Crime and Punishment, there was an exceptionally hot evening early in July. On this evening, in this imaginary story world, a young man came out of the garret (in this imaginary world) in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

Is this absurd or not? For a follower of objective truth, it is now necessary to talk about the existence of imagination; we are now constructing a region of the mind that perceives things that do not exist outside of the mind. This, in a twisted result, makes it viable for the relativist to be a relativist; what they think can be filed as the property of their imagination.

But if “truth is relative” is simply a thought of the imagination, much like a story, then what use is it? It cannot be used to prove anything or make claims, though “truth is objective” does not make any claims of its own. Practically, a pilot need not know the truth in gravity to use it; philosophically, a thinker who believes “truth is objective” merely goes to bed with more certainty about the possibility that their beliefs are true (though, since our ability to prove truth may not be quite up to it, we may, in the end, still not know anything). The argument about “what use” is thus, probably sophistry.

Another analogy may prove to be useful. When we talk about a painting, we no longer have recourse to the language we could normally resort to–truth and falsity. Paintings by Raphael and Rembrandt, we may argue, are constructions meant to have the same look as a scene the artist saw in real life; what, then, does a painting mean when the painting cannot be understood in this manner?

When we engage in dialogue, one of the implicit assumptions we make is that we speak of facts–things that are and things that are not. When critiquing artwork, this language can make discussion difficult and unwieldy. In contemporary, non-commercial art, the final statement is often the art itself (i.e. art qua art, and not art qua interpretative essay or money), and this statement is often nonverbal. Thus, for us to talk of “truth” at all, different language must be developed; we cannot assert Painting A over Painting B.

The past passage is the unwinding of the statement “what if ideas did not merely express themselves in truth and falsity?” One way to look at subjectivism and relativism is to consider them not antiobjectivism in nature, but rather a general sense that the realities of the world are non-verbal, much like a painting. The world, after all, simply is; the way we choose to label it is by using words and terms.

This, however, actually leaves room for objective reality to exist. A painting can be an assertion, and so can the world, even if we are not capable of expressing them linguistically; or, they can perhaps only subjectively exist, as constructed perception. I will stop here, so as not to cheapen the argument by making a judgment of truth or falsity.

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect…Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid fact. No such world is available. The closest men come to it is when they are infants or when they become insane: then, in a terrifying scene of meaningless events and senseless confusion, they are often seized with the panic of near-total insecurity. But in their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by ready-made interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and shall never meet. Yet for every man these images–provided by strangers and dead men–are the very basis of his life as a human being.

-C. Wright Mills, The Cultural Apparatus

If you get it wrong, the voice comes on the line to tell you. Hey, since you know what I did wrong and you know what I meant to do, why not just fix it? If I dial a number and forget the “1″, just insert the 1 and connect the call. If I dial a number and include the “1″ when I didn’t need to, just delete the 1 and connect the call. Don’t make me have to look up in the book whether I need a 1 or not. (In the front of the phone book are tables showing which numbers need a “1″ and which don’t. I hate those tables.)

(Yes, I know there are weird technical/legal reasons for why I have to dial the phone in four different ways depending on whom I want to call. But it’s still wrong that these technical/legal reasons mean that the rules for dialing a telephone are impossibly complicated.)

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/27/1160055.aspx

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to…

Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these options is absolutely, positively essential. Don’t bother. I know. Each additional choice makes complete sense until you find yourself explaining to your uncle that he has to choose between 15 different ways to turn off a laptop.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html

Both talk about decision making processes that may be reasonable in themselves, but lead to unreasonable conclusions. From the detail-oriented, rule-following side, it may make sense to display 25 menu options so that 99% of users have the functionality they need. However, the details are always there to support the whole, and not the other way around. If you design a multilingual sign, for example, the marginal benefit of adding another language may outweigh the cost, but continue on this calculation for too long and you get something like this:

Hype often glorifies romanticizes process over results. Think Agile Development, or Ruby on Rails, for example. The Daily WTF has many such examples (web services for one). Which leads to a rule of thumb: Make sure the results justify the methods you use.

In the end, processes are only remembered by the results they produce, and products are remembered by how good they were as a whole. Usability is important; development methodology is important; language is important; design philosophy is important. But like the works of a great artist, good software is not judged by how many rules it follows. We see results first, and only then do we find rules to explain their beauty.

Photo credits:

(http://www.pjchmiel.com/photo/misc.html)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach)

For some members of the open source movement, open source is the moral compass of the software industry. Richard Stallman would strongly disagree if you said “open source is about giving away software for free.” Rather, open source is about freedom–giving everyone the freedom to see how software works and use it without restrictions. At the heart of this is a broad intuitive idea that you can’t control ideas like they were physical products–that once someone gives me a piece of software, just like any real life object, it’s my right to see how it works and use it in any way I see fit.

Now, eight years after the term open source was first coined, we see two of the fruits of this movement–Linux and Firefox–gaining lots of public attention. On the other side, we see open source server technologies like Apache with an enormous foothold in the industry. Open source has gained traction, but does this mean that open source has succeeded in fulfilling a greater social mission?

No. Read on.

Owning Your Own Destiny

When one talks about “free as in freedom, not as in beer,” they are making a bold and rather brash statement about open source software. Open source claims that it’s open to everyone and enables you to make changes–it gives the user liberty to use the software however they wish. But this is hardly true.

For this openness to be in any way useful, it has to be practical. If I gave you a pile of 0s and 1s and said “hey, it’s open, you can do whatever you want with it,” it would be a total sham. Like the bible in Latin, such a giveaway would be almost useless to the average programmer who wanted to tinker with it or understand how it worked.

So, with this in mind, we might think it obvious that open source software would be the most usable of all software. It would have the most transparent interface, so you would know exactly what you were doing as a user. It would also be easily extensible–the code would enable you to work with it and manipulate it with ease.

However, while toasting itself over the success and freedom of open source software, the people who got largely overlooked are the group for which freedom means the most–normal people, the non-programming classes, who are the vast majority.

“Free as in quantum physics, not as in beer”

I understand C relatively well. It’s a programming language that’s not too difficult to pick up on (at least, the simpler parts of it), and the syntax isn’t absurdly arcane. Nevertheless, as a computer programmer (and a poor one at that), I’m a member of a rather small elite group. All programs are written in programming languages–it’s a given. However, for everyone who is not familiar with a programming language, the whole idea of freedom is crap–there is no real access and no real benefit.

Now you may argue that it’s simply not possible to write a program that everyone can understand. Even if we were to write in BASIC, most people wouldn’t get it, would they? On practical grounds, you’d have a good point–it’s not reasonable that we could get people to a good level of familiarity with computer programming, which is a magical language with its own quirky incantations.

However, if you want to claim that the fault lies with the general public for not being willing to spend the time to learn how to program and understand source code (something which, in my case, took me almost a decade of effort to become modestly decent at), then you are an elitist, albeit one with a pragmatic argument.

Firefox, one of the open source programs with the widest penetration, has started to suggest ways in which we can open up the architecture of open source software. Firefox enables extensions, which allow someone with a little Javascript background to get in and mess with the program. This ability to tinker, while not yet on the level of enabling true transparency, does bring us closer to the lofty ideal of “software for everyone.”

I don’t claim that making software architecture simple is an easy task–but it is one that is necessary to any sort of true universal freedom. Open source software will only be really and truly free when any motivated and intelligent person can put in a reasonable amount of effort and understand how it works. This is a worthy challenge for any of the minds who work in open source development.

But we can’t even get that far.

Even if we can’t make the layman a programmer, there is a lower bar we should at least be able to clear–making sure that the average user can use open source software without being an expert in it. And in this, open source has also lagged behind–ever try using GIMP?

User interface design has never been a priority for most open source projects. Richard Stallman argued that this priority was just as important as having open code when he wrote this:

The biggest deficiency in free operating systems is not in the software–it is the lack of good free manuals that we can include in these systems. [Stallman]

While he was talking about manuals, the point is the same. If your non-programmer friends can’t use Linux, is it really–as in freedom–free?