We led off the week with a diversion that might have been premature in the sense that I can do more tricks now than I could then, and a bit more gracefully too, I think. More video when I feel ready to graduate to actual fire.
Next a post on the different kinds of logic, and a related post on what it all means.
Sadly, the latter continued to draw comments from readers who want to “define the natural numbers via axioms”, whereas the whole point of these posts is that nothing of the sort is possible.
On Thursday I took issue with Robin Hanson’s take on polygamy; Robin responds here.
And on Friday I pointed to an unconventional high school valedictory speech.
Note to RSS readers: Friday’s “high school” post was originally scheduled for Thursday. But when I read Robin’s polygamy post on Wednesday night, I wanted to respond to it, so I scheduled that post for Thursday and rescheduled the high school post for Friday. For some reason the rescheduling didn’t take, so that the high school post was briefly posted Thursday morning before I realized what had happened and took it down. By then, though, the RSS feeds had it. So that’s why many of you saw the same post two days in a row.
Back on Monday of course.
For anyone interested in the D’Souza-Landsburg debate that will settle, once and for all, whether there is a God, apparently it’s airing on CSPAN-2 tonight (Saturday) at 7 Eastern Time. Since I can’t figure out how to TiVo an individual Book-TV episode, I guess I’ll have to stay home to watch. Should be fun!
Steve Reilly: “the D’Souza-Landsburg debate that will settle, once and for all, whether there is a God”
God is anxiously waiting. :-)
Steve Reilly: “the D’Souza-Landsburg debate that will settle, once and for all, whether there is a God”
God is anxiously waiting. :-)
Bob:
God is anxiously waiting. :-)
Did he tell you this directly?
Well, Bob, if God believes in democracy he can rest easy, since the voters sided with D’Souza. Although I was wrong about the topic of the debate since it centered on whether religion was good or bad for humanity rather than on whether or not The Big Guy exists.
Steve, if you’re ever short on topics for the blog, I’d like to hear you expand on one point you made that, I think, got lost with the time constraint. You asked Murray if Renaissance art was as much a boon to society as we think, since, after all, it diverted resources from things like feeding people who were living at the subsistence level. Murray’s non-answer, to the effect that of course art’s great, got applause, and I think people in the audience may have assumed that you were arguing that Michelangelo sucks or something of the sort. But I agree with the point you were making, and wouldn’t mind reading it without Stephen Moore banging a gavel in the background.
Steve Reilly: If I had it to do over again, I’d respond to Murray’s applause line with something like: “It’s nice that we’re rich enough to have the luxury of sentiments like that, isn’t it?”
Steve: “Did he tell you this directly?”
In a way. Do excuse Me for speaking in the third person.
I will give in to the temptation of paraphrasing Baudelaire (and Mr Kent): God’s greatest trick is to persuade you he exists.
It would also be fun to run the regressions on that man’s findings (correlations) between religion and a host of other pro-social traits.