For the second time in a week, I have written a post that I have deleted in an act of self-censorship.

A little while ago, Paul Graham had an essay about all those things that you are not allowed to say.

The Conformist Test

Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told.

To be clear - the opinions that I censored are things that I often talk about with my peers. We had such a good time discussing one of those topics at the pub last week that I rushed home to blog about it but then, in an act of cowardice, found myself unable to push the publish button. It’s not my peers that I am afraid of. It’s liberal orthodoxy (it would probably offend conservative othodoxy too, but I don’t care so much about offending that).

Paul Graham goes on…

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn’t do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.

If you believe everything you’re supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn’t also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s– or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

How does an opinion rise to the level of orthodoxy when it is so obviously wrong? More to the point - how to we bring it down again?

It’s not easy being a blogger when all the best topics are forbidden.

I only had 15 minutes when I nipped into B&N during Jazz’s piano lesson and I wanted to pick up a copy of V for Vendetta for Dylan. Since he had dressed as him for Halloween, I thought it only fair that he read the book too.

I was distracted though by a display of mini hardback books by the door - ooh those clever marketing people! I am most cured of impulse book buying these days. I rarely buy books any more and the times when I would just walk past a bookshop and end up with three books on photography are long gone. But there was something about these books…they were calling my name like a tiny voice from the past.

The little books were on various subjects - physics, geometry, chemistry, about a dozen others - and I didn’t have much time so I just grabbed the philosophy one and the geometry one and rushed off to find V. On the way to the checkout I realised that I couldn’t go home with books for me and Dylan but nothing for Jazz so I picked up a quite beautiful Inuyasha book making this my biggest book purchase since 1999.

Oh my word, this book is fantastic. If you only ever read one book on philosophy, read this one. Every important point is illustrated with a joke and the jokes are hilarious. As I finish each chapter (all very short), I go do a stand up routine for my family to great applause. I am trying to pace my reading to make it last but it’s mostly unputdownable.

Here’s a sample joke, (adapted for my own nefarious purposes):

Atheist: Look! All the sheep on that hillside have been sheared!

Agnostic: Yes. On this side.

Read the introduction online. Then buy it. You’ll thank me for it even if you think posts on philosophy are too cerebral for a blog.

Still catching up on my book reviews here…

I have read a bunch of books about philosophers but I have never before read a book about philosophy. The trouble with reading about philosophers is that by that time you have slogged through 18 Greeks with similar sounding names they all blur into one and you can’t recall the difference between an atomist and an epicurean. It’s much easier to read about, say, ethics when it is all in one chapter.

Reading the book pretty much confirmed for me what Paul Graham said that the only thing 3000 years of philosophy has taught us is that there are limits to what we can know.

I am glad I read it but I won’t recommend it to anyone else.

The most disappointing thing was to read so many chapters about aesthetics, ethics, justice and morality and never once come across the word ‘evolution’. It seems a shocking oversight and I have written to Professor Grayling asking him to rectify that in a future edition.

My wife just asked me if I have booked that flight yet. When I get home, she will ask me if I have submitted my expenses yet. The answer to both is no - because I was reading this.

Of course, she won’t read that because she is not a procrastinator and doesn’t understand how procrastinators work so I’ll quote a little bit for her:

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Jeff will have read it already because he has more important things to do and, when he asks me if I am done with that report yet? I will say no because I was writing this blog.

 It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.)

The non-procrastinators among you

 may be asking, “How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?”

To find out the answer, you’ll have to read the article. But, of course,  the procrastinators have already read it.

In the scientifically literate world, and even in many parts of the United States, evolution has become mundane fact.

The Evolution of Language

Sam Harris, of the Harlem Globetrotters, offers a powerful defence of liberal morality:

 even a liberal like myself, enamored as I am of my two-footed morality, can readily see that my version of the good life must be safeguarded from the aggressive tribalism of others. When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose.

At The Edge 

I have a theory of comedy. To test my theory, I’d like all readers to state their preference in the comments. Please include a reason if you have one.

Which are funnier, monkeys or weasels?

I have a follow up question.

Reading Harris is like watching professional wrestling or the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s great fun, with lots of acrobatics, but it must not be mistaken for an actual contest

Jonathan Haidt at The Edge

Bob just moved his blog and when I popped over to check it out, I noticed that he had been continuing our discussion about Belief in Belief without me
From his comments,

Since there is no proof of the existence AND THERE IS NO PROOF OF THE NON-EXISTENCE of God or FSM, any position taken on the matter, other than agnosticism, is pure faith. Without proof that God does not exist, it is possible that God might actually exist.

By a pleasant happenstance, I just read the chapter in Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works where he talks about scientific proofs and how inappropriate they are for everyday circumstances. According to Pinker, our ancestors on the savanna evolved sophisticated mental machinery for dealing with probabilities but formal proofs … not so much.

The number of domains outside of pure maths where proofs are appropriate, or even possible, is vanishingly small and only a logician would claim that belief in something completely improbable and disbelief in something completely improbable are in any way equivalent. Fortunately, most of the rest of us deal in probabilities and most of us would conclude that the possibility of an entity existing

1. which violates many of the known laws of nature and
2. for which there is absolutely no evidence

is so close to zero as to be not worth considering.

Bob seems to be asserting that, given a proposition that is almost certainly false, the only reasonable position to take is to say “I don’t know” and that any other position requires an unreasonable leap of faith.
I cannot prove that I am not brain in a vat. I cannot prove that you exist. I cannot prove that I existed this morning. I have no need to prove them. It would not be useful to prove them. The evidence to support those positions is overwhelming, is reasonable and requires no leap of faith. The opposite positions - that I am a brain in a vat or that you do not exist or that I did not exist this morning - require an unreasonable leap of faith.
There is no god. I am certain of it.

Muriel Gray doesn’t like the word Bright either, so she has coined her own word.

Here’s what I believe as an Enlightenist. Atheism is not a driving concern, since belief in God is of little consequence. After all, if there is an interventionist God then there would be continuing demonstrable evidence of such, which there most certainly is not, and if there is a creator God who is non-interventionist then he neither requires nor merits worship, and if there is no God at all then so be it. Therefore you could happily suspect that there might be a non-interventionist God of sorts that could eventually be discovered scientifically and still be an Enlightenist. Since no action needs to be taken until such an unlikely discovery, it doesn’t matter. Now let’s move on.

Practical stuff. Now, having coined a term, she writes a manifesto to go with it.

Enlightenists believe in the awe-inspiring, wonder, beauty and complexity of the universe, and aspire to unpick its mysteries by reason, constant questioning, observation, experiment, and analysis of evidence. The bedrock of our morality is empathy, from which logically springs love, forgiveness, tolerance and a profound desire to make a just, egalitarian society and reduce suffering. The more knowledge a person has, the more they question and understand the real world, and the more they are required to analyse what is true then the greater the increase in empathy. Enlightenists care and wish to do good not because a vengeful God tells them to, but because intelligence suggests it is the only and the right thing to do.

Now she thinks that she is entitled to charter schools too (in the UK, public schools can hook up with a religion and exclude people not of that religion).

So there we have it then, that’s the belief manifesto. Now, where the hell are my bloody state-funded schools? We’re always told about the high performance of superstition schools verses non-denominational ones, but we know that’s because any parent willing to pretend to be religious to get their child in is a parent interested in their child’s education, and involved parents equal successful children. Can you imagine the unseemly scramble for places if we were to be granted a state-funded Enlightenist school? Children would be welcome from any religious or ideological background, with the parents only having to fulfil the brief of allowing their children to be taught in the Enlightenist manner.

All entirely sensible if you ask me.

I wish Muriel were running The Brights instead of Mynga. Then I could call myself an enlightenmentalist or something.