There’s this kickstarter project in its closing days — they have four days to raise $40,000 — which aims to put together a lovely hardcover photography book titled A Better Life by Chris Johnson. It’s a good cause, and it dies on Sunday if the goal isn’t met — help out if you can!
If you’ve got any money left after your profligate spree in my store yesterday, you might want to look at the Egyptian Renaissance Alliance. Not a penny goes to me, but it does benefit Egyptian secularists — and they’ve got some nice stuff.
The major cataclysm that struck my inbox was, of course, that silly incident with a cracker. I still get hate mail from Catholics, and intermittently still receive politely horrified regular mail from little old Catholic ladies who want to pray for me.
But the second biggest outrage I ever perpetrated may not have caught the attention of most readers: I criticized Ray Kurzweil! I still get angry email from people who stumble across this post I originally wrote in 2005, and are really pissed off that I think Saint Kurzweil is a charlatan.
“Singularly silly singularity” – You have much in common with the creationist you so despise.
For a PhD and self-proclaimed intellectual you show an utterly remarkable incapability to understand what the Singularity even is, though this does not stop you from attacking it in the cocksure fashion of the creationist attacking evolution as what he believes is the direct conversion of ape into man.
The Singularity, though inextricably related to the increasing rate of technological advancement, IS NOT a statement that this acceleration alone will lead to the sorts of things Kurzweil proposes. The Singularity is describing what occurs after the creation of a smarter-than-human artificial intelligence. By it’s very nature the workings of this AI’s ‘mind’ will be unintelligible to us. This incapability of understanding, which will compound upon itself as the AI makes advances and improvements of it’s own, acts as an ‘event horizon,’ (I should take this moment to point out that you would do well to learn what a gravitational singularity is, as it may help you understand why you are so off the mark in your incorrect understanding of the Singularity) obscuring the ability to make predictions about what course the future will take.
I’ll even grant you the underlying argument of your article opposing Kurzweil’s “Countdown to Singularity” graph (even though you clearly do not understand log vs. log graphs, which cannot be extended into the future). Stating that there is no trend of the acceleration of the rate of technological advancement DOES NOTHING to disprove the existence of the Singularity as the Singularity is a statement about what happens AFTER the creation of faster-than-human AI and not about what happens before it.
You should perhaps try thinking rather than just knowing.
-Wyatt
You know, I appreciate the fact that there is an increasing pattern of technological change — I’ve lived through the last 50 years, where we’ve gone from computers being vast arcane artifacts that cost millions of dollars to plod through mundane calculations, to being stupid little machines that let us play pong on our televisions, to becoming the routine miracle that we now use to process all our media and communicate with our friends. I get that. I do expect to be dazzled over the next few decades (if I live that long) as new technologies emerge.
But predictions of incremental advances on the basis of past experience are routine; predictions of a single, species-defining moment of radical transformation for which there are no predecessors is a data-free assumption. It can’t be justified.
Despite my correspondent’s claim that the source for the claim of a singularity is not accelerating technological advancement, that’s all Kurzweil talks about: the entire first third of The Singularity is Near (yes, I have a copy…it’s even a signed copy that he sent to me!) is a repetitive drumbeat of graphs, graphs, graphs, all showing an inexorable trend: per capita GDP, education expenditures, nanotechnology patents, price-performance for wireless data devices, on and on. That really is the foundation of his whole argument: technology advancement is accelerating, therefore we’re going to get immortality before we die. All you have to do is hang on until 2029.
What really bugs me about Kurzweil is that he blatantly fudges his data. I picked on this chart before: the data is nonsense, comparing all kinds of events that don’t really compare at all — speciation is equivalent to Jobs and Wozniak building a computer in a garage? Really? — and arbitrarily lumps together some events and omits others to create points that fit on his curve. Why does the Industrial Revolution get a single point, condensing all the technological events (steam engines, jacquard looms, iron and steel processing, architecture, coal mining machinery, canal building, railroads) into one lump, while the Information Revolution gets a finer-grained dissection into its component bits? Because that makes them fit into his pattern.
He also shows this linear plot of the same data, which I think makes the problem clear.
It’s familiarity and recency. If a man in 1900 of Kurzweil’s bent had sat down and made a plot of technological innovation, he’d have said the same thing: why, look at all the amazing things I can think of that have occurred in my lifetime, the telegraph and telephone, machine guns and ironclad battleships, automobiles and typewriters, organic chemistry and evolution. Compared to those stodgy old fellows in the 18th century, we’re just whizzing along! And then he would have drawn a little chart, and the line would have gone plummeting downward at an awesome rate as it approached his time, and he would have said, “By Jove! The King of England will rule the whole planet by 1930, and we’ll be mining coal on Mars to power our flying velocipedes!”
I would also suggest to my correspondent that if he thinks extrapolating from graphs is not appropriate, he look a little more closely at Kurzweil’s writings and wonder why he’s extrapolating from graphs so much. I didn’t create those charts I mock; Kurzweil did.
I think there’s something ironic about the juxtaposition of this fantasy image and my quote, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Like others, I was raised in a fundamental Christian household, first as an Independent Baptist and then a Southern Baptist. We went to church at least three, sometimes five times a week. I was a good girl, very obedient and believing, but I remember being thrown by a Sunday school teacher’s answer when I asked where your soul was – floating above your head, she replied. So I was a bit skeptical of souls from third grade on. (Side note – I reasoned there was no santa when I was five because santa’s presents were addressed to me in my dad’s handwriting. Ditto with easter bunnies and tooth fairies. I wasn’t completely naïve, just when it had to do with religion.)
I excelled in everything God- and church-related; I wanted to be a good example of a Christian from an early age. So after I was saved at four years old I worked hard to learn as many Bible verses as possible, to be obedient, to witness to my friends, to hand out popsicles at the park on hot days, etc. One of my proudest moments was when I won my state’s Southern Baptist youth Bible Drill contest and got to go to nationals. I taught Sunday school and Vacation Bible School from high school on, sang in the choir, helped lead our music program while in college. Over the summer of my junior year of college I married the pastor’s son, my high school beau (because God told us to get married), and we led the youth group together, intending to go to seminary after a couple years. At this point I had been part of the church for twenty years and it was the source of all of my comfort, friends, fun, and work.
My changes started while in high school. I was convicted over and over that I wasn’t “truly saved” and spent many nights and mornings desperate and crying while studying my Bible. One day something clicked, I forget what it was, but I had an “experience” that I thought was salvation for real, so I got re-baptized. A year or so later my new year’s resolution was to understand how salvation works, so I spent a lot of time analyzing Bible verses and reading Christian authors. Except that things started unraveling. I gave up the notion of the soul entirely, then later miracles, then prayer. By the time I got married in college I believed God had pre-ordained everything and didn’t interfere with the world, because that wouldn’t make sense. An astronomy course my senior year of college opened my eyes to actual science and messed more with my already-hanging-by-a-thread belief system. It didn’t help that my husband was a philosophy major who discussed logic puzzles with me every day. So for a year my beliefs came undone as I watched, helpless, rationalizing everything in an attempt to hold it together. Then one day I narrowly avoided a car crash and realized I hadn’t prayed. It’s impossible to describe the floor falling from under your feet , the helplessness. I knew I didn’t believe in God anymore, but had no idea what to do. My husband was headed to seminary, my church was my lifeline, my whole life revolved around God and Jesus.
After some months’ awkwardness, I discovered my husband had also stopped believing in God. We finished up at the church and fled town within a year, anxious to separate ourselves from religion. Now I had no friends or family, no work, only a husband who was as unhinged as I was. Lots of alcohol, some counseling, and ten years later, we’re still together. It’s a rare thing to have a friend who shared such an experience.
So why am I an atheist? The short answer is because I finally saw my religion for what it was: a confusing set of beliefs that made no sense once carefully considered. That said, I would not wish this experience on anyone. Sure, I consider myself more moral and caring than I ever was before, but I also lost all my friends and am still rebuilding the trust of my family and my husband’s family. In the end, it’s worth it to be a rational person, but I will always feel haunted by my past and have regrets.
CM
I’ve got to say it: I never heard of Frisco, Texas before, and had no idea where it is. But it’s apparently a big city of 100,000 people out in the northeast part of the state, north of Dallas/Fort Worth, and they are putting on an atheist convention! These things are getting to be everywhere, and I think this is an excellent development. We just had an excellent event out here in a much more obscure part of the world (but where it is needed), and now Texas is popping up pockets of rationality everywhere.
Let’s see Amarillo and Midland and Corpus Christi join in the trend — a great wave of people of reason standing up and making themselves known all across the state.
Until the Great Texas Atheist Revolution, though, you’ll have to go to the North Texas Secular Student Convention. It’s got a great lineup; everyone in the region should hop into your Volvos with the gay pride bumper sticker and head to Frisco on the 14th of April.
Damon Fowler- student activist
David Fitzgerald- historian, author of “Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All”
Hemant Mehta- author of “I Sold my Soul on eBay” and “The Friendly Atheist” blog
Dorian Mooneyham- student LGBT activist
David Smalley, former editor of American Atheist magazine, host of “Dogma Debate“ podcast, author of “Baptized Atheist”
As well as a debate featuring:
Matt Dillahunty- President of the Atheist Community of Austin, co-host of “The Atheist Experience“
JT Eberhard- High School Coordinator of the Secular Student Alliance, founder of Skepticon
John Ferrer
Dr. Sloan Lee — Philosophy and Logic teacher at The Cambridge School of Dallas, primary research in the philosophies of religion and science
I don’t know about this…here’s Rebecca Watson flogging merchandise, and she pushes all this SGU stuff first, and ends with the new Skepchick t-shirt last, and just kind of tosses in the spectacular Chibi PZ Tee and the gloriously intimidating Pharyngula travel mug in the middle. What’s with all this secondary frippery surrounding the most important stuff, my merch?
I may have to have a little talk with her about priorities. Nobody listens to Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe anymore, do they? And why would anyone wear a Skepchick shirt when they could have a cute and adorable cartoon me on their chest?
I can sort of sympathize: here’s a Christian pastor who’s trying to be relevant and a little bit progressive, and actually make real life issues, like sex, part of his church. And then, splat, look at this pratfall.
"On one side, (we’ll have) what men want or desire: your stripper pole, your video games, your sports," Scruggs said. "The woman’s side (is) orderly, neat. It’s all about love, candy, teddy bears, roses and being wined and dined and cherished."
This is what we call not really getting it. He’s dimly aware of a problem, but thinks the answer involves pushing stereotypes harder.
You know what Southerners are all like? They’re all
Rural,
poor and lazy,
stupid,
red-necked conservatives, and
all the same.
Wait a moment…you mean those aren’t all true? If you think they are, maybe you need to read this article on Southern stereotypes.
I have not spent much time in the South (wait…maybe the stereotype is true, because y’all haven’t been smart enough to invite me to come on down and give a fire-eating atheist talk), but one thing that has persuaded me that pinning blame on Southerners is a huge mistake is that I live in rural Minnesota, about as Northern as you can get without turning inside out over the top of the swing and becoming Canadian, and those stereotypes could be equally well applied here. People are people everywhere, and the entire goddamned country is afflicted with god-fearing tea-partyin’ Jebus-fellatin’ racist warmongering American exceptionalists who hate edumacation and gays. You can’t give Alabama the dirty squink-eye without doing the same to Pennsylvania and Arizona and Idaho and yes, even Massachusetts and Minnesota. It’s a huge mistake to focus our concern on geography rather than uneducated social attitudes.
Besides, I want to see the South become a bastion of liberal progressiveness, like say, Austin or Chapel Hill. I’m not interested in seeing it turned into a convenient ghetto for bigotry.
Mitt Romney is arguing that Obama is fighting for secularism.
I think there is in this country a war on religion. I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism.
They gave it a lot of thought and they decided to say that in this country that a church — in this case, the Catholic Church — would be required to violate its principles and its conscience and be required to provide contraceptives, sterilization and morning after pills to the employees of the church. … We are now all Catholics. Those of us who are people of faith recognize this is — an attack on one religion is an attack on all religion.
I’m an atheist fighting against religion. If it were me running for office, Romney could legitimately make that case. But Obama is openly Christian, he has expanded support for faith-based charities, he ends speeches with “god bless”, he attends prayer breakfast and praises faith. He is no ally of mine in this cause, even if he’s willing to acknowledge the existence of atheists now and then.
To argue that religious organizations, in their dealings with the profane material world in payroll and insurance and taxes (and in getting financial support from our secular government), ought to also abide by the laws in those dealings, is not an attack on religion. Romney is apparently one of those people who wants to bestow all kinds of special privileges on the churches…but then, that’s his whole life, privilege.
