Key topics so far: Evolution by means of natural selection. How life is a digital code. Reflective equilibrium and the evolution of non-objective morality. How evolution explains the conflicts in human social life. And how levels of such “variation-selection processes” are everywhere.
Subtitled “Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works”
Harper Perennial, 2013, xx + 411pp, including 9-page index.
How nonbelief is stickier than belief. Plus: Fox News lied! Who would have thought? And: how UFOs and CRT go together; the number of respectable Republicans.
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OnlySky, Andrew Fiala, 15 Feb 2023: What the stickiness of nonbelief says about the ‘religious instinct’, subtitled “As nonbelief is normalized, the assumption that human beings have a natural religious instinct no longer makes sense.”
When life was simple and everything you were supposed to know was contained in a single book. Also: why The Lord of the Rings is so appealing to the right; media libel laws; policing; and a lagniappe about a real flying saucer.
I’ve noted before how conservatives denounce “indoctrination” except when they’re the ones doing the indoctrinating. Examples include DeSantis imposing conservative values on a Florida college long known as a bastion of “free thinkers”. And examples of people believing things that are not true.
John Scalzi on writing about politics; Republican performance art; Paul Krugman on Republican intentions over decades against Medicare and Society Security; and notes about books about American myths past and present.
Margaret Atwood on the people banning her book The Handmaid’s Tale; Jared Diamond on the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and long-term disaster planning.
Margaret Atwood, The Atlantic, 12 Feb 2023: Go Ahead and Ban My Book, subtitled “To those who seek to stop young people from reading The Handmaid’s Tale: Good luck with that. It’ll only make them want to read it more.”
A familiar lesson, which conservatives cannot seem to learn. Ban something, and you create a desire for it. (Similar to the Streisand effect.) Atwood begins:
Here’s a local news item of interest on several points. And then my history of being victim of crime.
ABC 7 News, 10 Feb 2023: Family of Oakland baker seeks ‘restorative justice’ for her death following robbery
Catching up on links not yet used from the past week or so. Jerry Coyne responds to Timothy Keller’s presumptions about the metaphysical truth of Christianity and the need for a revived Church; The obvious evidence for lack of a “divine plan”; An example of Hollywood’s worst; and items about the balloon and Ozone Man.
Ted Chiang on ChatGPT; Paul Krugman on the GOP’s Orwellian take on the world; and epistemology.
Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, 9 Feb 2023: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, subtitled “OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?”
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I mentioned those John Brockman anthologies of science essays back on Feb 4th. They’re associated with the website Edge.org, one of those fascinating websites I’ve noticed over the years but have not followed regularly (others are Big Think, Quanta, Aero, Quillette…) but in this case perhaps should…. Well, except that it doesn’t seem to post much new material lately. Continue reading
