While you’re all missing me, there are three games you might want to try that I’ve been playing at rationality camp. The first two games are related. The first one is called the Calibration Game and the second is called the Updating Game. (Note: both those links start downloads of zip files). Both are trivia games, but, although you’re trying to get questions right, the focus is less on how knowledgeable you are and more on how good you are... Read more
Last week, I got to do an interview/argument with fellow Patheos blogger and Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta on Justin Brierley’s podcast Unbelieveable! You can stream the podcast from Justin’s website or you can download it from iTunes. This is probably my favorite media thing I’ve done so far, since I find it easier to express myself in the context of an argument than I do in the scope of a conventional “How do you feel?” interview. It’s easier to realize when you’re... Read more
I’m having a delightful time at Rationality Camp, and I have two LessWrong posts to recommend today: “Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence” and “Conservation of Expected Evidence.” (Read these first, I’m gesturing at them, but not summarizing below). They start with this quote from Robyn Dawes’s Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: Post-hoc fitting of evidence to hypothesis was involved in a most grievous chapter in United States history: the internment of Japanese-Americans at the beginning of the... Read more
(Not that one, but I do strongly recommend CTY to any readers with children). I’m in California today and for the rest of the week for a rationality minicamp run by the people behind Less Wrong and the Singularity Institute. This is the kind of summer camp where, before you go, they send you and two close friends a detailed survey, so they have a baseline to assess the impact of the camp on you in a year when they... Read more
Thanks for your feedback on my draft of the comment policy. I’ve added it to the top navigation bar, but, it turns out I’ve added it one day too late. One of the writers at Friendly Atheist took umbrage at commenter Gilbert saying this in reply to the post where I asked readers to chip in to help the SSA deal with DDoS attacks. Any chance of collecting the money on our side? ’cause I really don’t feel like giving... Read more
— 1 — I’m off at seeing The Dark Rises tonight. (I’ve prewritten these and am going straight to bed when I get home, so don’t expect thoughts [ETA: let’s just say Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon Levitt are both really pretty and leave it at that]). For this midnight premier I didn’t do a costume, alas. The gritty, realistic approach that Nolan takes with these trilogies means that dressing up for this film ends up being a lot more about accuracy... Read more
The Pentagon is considering awarding Distinguished Warfare Medals to drone pilots and Glen Greenwald is furious. He sees it as an attempt “to depict drone warfare as some sort of courageous and noble act.” Greenwald and I are in accord in condemning the use of drones for assassination, but I don’t know that I agree with his critique here. Greenwald says flying a drone cannot meet any of our traditional criteria for valor because: Whatever one thinks of the justifiability... Read more
When a Christian church got tagged with atheist-themed graffiti last year, I chipped in for repairs, along with a lot of other atheists. (I ended up with post-length mixed feelings but still think it was the right decision). And now it turns out I’ve converted just in time for another “Sorry about our team’s bad behavior” fundraiser. Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism reports that the Secular Student Alliance is getting a lot of DDoS attacks, and they’ve had to pay to... Read more
Given the influx of new readers and some questions , I’d like to add a Comments Policy tab to the top of the blog. Here’s my first draft, so let me know if anything needs clarification, if you know how to make a warning sound less hectoring, or if you have other suggestions. I only delete comments that are obviously spam. (Fun fact: the easiest way real comments get mistaken for spam is when they pay me an unspecific compliment).... Read more
Given the way our discussion of pacifism has meandered over to a debate about martyrdom, what you want to “accomplish” with your death (and whether that’s a coherent question), I’d like to recommend something for your summer reading list: Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. It’s a fabulous book. It doesn’t presuppose that you’re a Civil War buff, so casual readers have no barrier to entry, and it delves into a strange, tightly-circumscribed... Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
Unequally Yoked
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In