Viridia.org

As a child I attended Catholic elementary school of a particularly traditional sort: I (along with my brother and three sisters) attended San Juan Capistrano Mission elementary school. This included going to mass in an adobe church every day, being taught by nuns (who I like to refer to as “frustrated women in the costume of a barbarian age”), and generally being inculcated with a sectarian world view. It seems like they did a rather poor job of it, at least in my case, since neither me nor any of my siblings have ever manifested even the slightest tendancy towards theistic belief once they reached adulthood, so fas as I can tell.

I was a very shy and isolated boy, and I didn’t have many friends. To amuse myself during breaks, I would often pretend that I was having a conversation with someone who knew absolutely nothing about humanity, such as an alien or a time traveller. I would imagine that this hypothetical conversant would ask me questions about the world, such as “why do you humans have war?”, and then I would go into a long discussion about the causes of violence and political tensions and so on. Of course, my knowledge of such things was rudimentary and naive, but in many cases I was able to give a reasonably logical answer to the question.

This mental excersize served a useful purpose, in that it helped me sort out my own knowledge, untangling all the kinks and reconciling inconsistencies in what I had been taught. It also served as practice for another sort of mental discipline, which is the knack of being able to step outside my own situation and try to look at things from the point of view of an outside observer - a really, far, far outside observer, one that is not even human. (Of couse, since I still possess human biology and instinct, I can never be 100% successful at this, but its still entertaining to try.)

In other contexts this is known as “jumping out of the system”. An example is playing chess: When you are playing chess your mind is caught up in a “chess system”, where your thoughts are concerned with the positions of the pieces, the opponent’s strategy, and so on, with little concern for things like world events or even the state of your immediate environment. However, when you jump out of the system, you are suddenly able to realize that you are in fact sitting in front of a chess board, playing chess with another person - and that you may choose at any moment to continue playing or not.

As a result of all this, I tended to view the things that I was taught in school from a slightly different perspective. For things like science and math, little internal examination was needed, since those things were clearly self-consistent and didn’t require much combing out of the kinks (and they even had live demonstrations - lab experiments - of the truth of what was being taught!) But other classes - history, geography, politics, and especially religion - required constant internal maintenance in order to keep my mind in a mostly harmonious state where everything made some kind of sense.

Now, all successful religions have methods for immunizing you against the fundamental logical inconsistencies of their sacred texts. One thing that I was taught - and I still believe this is true - is that you can’t make someone a believer (or an unbeliever) through logical argument. There is always a way to rationalize away the logical problems if you really want to - the key is making someone really want to. What I was taught was that the way to “convert” people is to be the kind of person that other people want to be - in other words, to behave so as to set a good example that other people will want to follow. Conversely, people who try to “convince” you that a particular worldview is true generally only succeed in coming off as obnoxious to the listener.

So I was never all that troubled by the logical inconsistencies in the Bible. What was far more troubling to me were the moral inconsistencies. It was clear to me, even at that age, that there were some things that I was being taught that were just plain morally wrong — wrong in the sense that they were in direct contradiction to the principles of “right and wrong” that were taught to me by the very same people.

For example, I was taught that it is morally wrong to unjustly cause suffering to other people and other creatures. At the same time, however, I was also taught that after death, some people will undergo an eternity of suffering in hell. I’m not talking about the watered-down hell that most preachers speak of today, which is merely “the absence of God”. I’m talking about real hellfire, lakes of fire, sadistic demons whose only purpose is to make you suffer forever, that sort of thing.

To this day I find this concept horrifying. What’s worse, is that my fertile imagination could conjure up far more horrifying torments than anything my teachers (or H. R. Giger, or H. P. Lovecraft) could describe. And of course, my perverse brain, like a rabbit caught in the headlights, could often find nothing better to do than to contemplate such horrors and invent new ones. Add to the list of human cruelties - teaching the concept of hell to an imaginative, creative child.

Now, suppose we even accept the idea that there is some sort of cosmic need for punishment (which I don’t neccessarily accept, but let’s take it as a given.) It would be “just” if the degree of punishment was in proportion to the degree of sin.

But human lives are finite, and the amount of sin we are capable of is also finite. Even if Hitler and Stalin, the greatest mass murderers in history, were to be held accountable for each death for which they were responsible, eventually that list must come to an end; Eventually one must cry “enough”. But hell is, or so I was taught, infinite. An infinity of suffering. There is no escape from Dante’s inferno. How is that justice?

Which leads to another problem, which is how are the people in Heaven supposed to be happy and joyful if there are these people down below being tortured? Don’t they have any compassion? Or are they so mean-spirited that they rejoice in the suffering of others? That doesn’t sound like any Heaven that I want to go to.

And then there’s this whole business of Christ dying for your sins. It doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice when he gets rezzed three days later. Oh, sure you’ll go to jail for me, but you’ve already got a “get out of jail free” card? Oh, it’s a few hours of pain on the cross? I’ll admit that the Romans were pretty good at the torture biz, but women all over the world experience long hours of intense suffering during the process of childbirth every day.

And what does the suffering on the cross have to do with my sins anyway? Is this like one of those fictional hostage situations where the hero says “let them go, and take me instead”? In that case, who is the hostage taker? Why are they taking hostages in the first place, and if so, why would they allow an arbitrary substitution of victims? “I don’t care who gets punished, someone is going to suffer for this!”

And don’t get me started on the notion of original sin. How can a sin be “inherited”? That hardly seems like justice.

During my teenage years, all of these internal dilemmas caused me much misery. I knew for sure that I was destined for eternal suffering because I couldn’t force myself to accept the moral contradictions of the religion I had been taught. I worried myself sick over the fact that I wasn’t a “good person” - despite the fact that in every other aspect of my life I was good to a fault. (Well, perhaps not so much “good” as merely meek, unaggressive and generally cowed by a society of peers that didn’t seem to understand me very well.)

The only solution, for me, was to “jump out of the system” - to try and step outside the whole mental construction of religion and consider that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t true. It took a long, long time for me to be comfortable with the idea that the whole thing might just be a story, and I cannot tell you how much of a relief it was to me once I accepted it.

A small digression: One of the things that helped me view religion as a social construction was reading fiction novels such as Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The irony here is that I was first introduced to the book by a devout, evangelical christian - a self-proclaimed “jesus freak” who I knew briefly in high school, and who saw the book as supportive to her faith.

The views that I hold today are a reflection and an outgrowth of these experiences. As a result of my upbringing, I know far more about the Bible than most people realize. And - because of my tendancy to try and look at things from a non-human perspective - I can see that the Bible is a very human kind of book. And not just any human - it’s a book written by, and for, classical and medieval humans.

The Bible “feels” to me very much like the kind of story that humans in primitive societies would make up. For example, the notion that there is some kind of Cosmic Alpha Male, a “Lord” (meaning “Landowner”) seems to me the kind of thing that a person living in an authoritarian society might project onto the nature of the universe. The idea of a Kingdom of Heaven might make sense for a person who is used to living in kingdoms, but it doesn’t resonate with any of my experience.

If you subtract away the human perspective, there is nothing in nature that conforms to the “celestial kingdom” model of organization. Rather, the rule in nature is not one of top-down, authoritarian control, but rather bottom-up, emergent flows of competition and cooperation. Although some animals instinctively form themselves into authoritarian hierarchies, even these are dynamic systems, in which the alpha wolf can be challenged and replaced by a newer, younger model.

The stories in the Bible are stories about human nature - about love, and revenge, and politics. Some of the stories - such as the book of Job - are quite subtle, reflecting a fairly sophisticated calculus of right and wrong that is far more complex than the simple elementary-school morality I was taught. But even these books are based on a set of underlying premises that are at heart primitive and tribal.

To many of us, the idea of God seems reasonable and natural because we are surrounded with it from childhood, and because we are taught the idea from people who we love and respect. But only a human could dream up such a fantastic notion.

And only a human could believe it.

As a science fiction fan, I’m less interested in the question “Does God Exist?”, than in the more speculative question “If God existed, what would he/she be like?”

The best attempt that anyone has ever done at answering this question was in Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker (1937), which tells the story of a galactic civilization and its search to achieve contact with the creator. It describes a being whose primary characteristic is creativity, a being that has undergone an artistic evolution through the creation of many universes, of which ours is neither the first or the last.

However, I was thinking along somewhat different lines. The idea that we’re actually inside a computer simulation is a pretty old one. There’s an anthropic argument that says if simulating a universe is possible, then chances are we are in a simulation, since the simulation would likely be run many times.

Its also interesting to think that the person running the simulation might not be omniescent or infinitely smart - in fact, they might not even be as smart as we are. At least, one could make the argument that the whole reason for them running the simulation is to find the answer to some problem that they themselves aren’t capable of figuring out by themselves.

If scientists were to uncover evidence that this universe is inside a virtual machine, what consequences would that have? Would we owe any duty to the people responsible for creating the simulation? Would they owe any duty to us? How could we convince them to continue to spend resources running it?

One bit of evidence that points against the idea that we’re in a simulation is the fact that the universe is far larger than it needs to be to host a civilization such as ours. The only possible counter-arguments that I can think of are (a) the rest of the universe is being simulated at a lower resolution, (b) we will eventually use that extra space for something, or (c) that there are other civilizations out there that are already using it.

Lately I’ve been quite involved with the Python language, in particular discussions of the future evolution of the language on the various Python.org mailing lists. In fact, I’m currently the author (or in some cases co-author) of 4 Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPS):

• PEP 3101: Advanced String Formatting
• PEP 3102: Keyword-Only Arguments
• PEP 3115: Metaclasses in Python 3000
• PEP 3119: Introducing Abstract Base Classes

Several of these have been officially accepted, others are still under consideration. Only the last one, 3119, has any significant unresolved issues.

In addition, it appears that I am going to be part of an informal discussion group at Google consisting of a number of Python developers - including Guido van Rossum, the creator of the language - who will be meeting regularly to discuss the ongoing development of the language.

I’m very excited about all of this, in partular I’ve been feeling for a long time a need to be “part of something” that I think is important, and more specifically part of a community.

Today was my first day of work at Google. Most of the day was spent in orientation, however there are two interesting things to report: 1) The monitor on my desk is 30 inches. 2) My co-worker, sitting less than 10 feet away is the legendary Andy Hertzfeld.

I’ve just uploaded my latest composition, Anousheh’s Journey. Enjoy!

One of the lessons I’ve learned recently is to never let your most important data - such as personal contacts, records, and so on - be trapped in a proprietary file format.

For example, my friend Barney has recently been going through hell because his massive contact database is stored in Outlook/Exchange. While its true that you can export the individual entries of the database as a flat file, what’s missing is the relationships between those records (such as groups and mailing lists) which cannot easily be extracted. And in Barney’s case, a large proportion of the usage value of that database is those relationships.

I had a minor epiphany today that I would like to share:

“If you want to be a successful game designer, the one thing you must never do is think of fun things for other people to do.”

Now, at this point your reaction might be “huh? Isn’t that what game designers are supposed to do for a living - think of fun things for other people to do?”

The key part is the words other people. Thinking of fun things for other people to do requires putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagining what they might find fun, as opposed to putting yourself in your own shoes and imagining what you might find fun. Or even better, just having fun yourself, without having to imagine it.

Trying to come up with novel situations that other people might find fun - without actually having fun yourself - is something that is so difficult that it should be, in my opinion, considered impossible for all practical purposes. I’m not talking about merely listing previously-known activities that are already known to be fun - I’m talking about dreaming up new activities, which have not yet been discovered to be in the “fun” category.

What’s worse, a lot of people seem to arrogantly believe that they can do it, when in fact they are really terrible at it. And they waste enormous amounts of game developer resources attempting to realize their designs which turn out, in the end, to be - not fun.

Game design of this type is a lot like drunk driving, in that there is a mismatch between what the drunk driver believes that they are capable of, and what they are actually capable of. A drunk drive may believe that they are capable of getting home safely. And in fact, they might, if they are lucky, accomplish it. But they are more likely to crash and kill someone. So in order to prevent this, it makes good sense to reinforce the belief that it is utterly impossible to drive safely while drunk, even thought it’s not. In the case of game design, we aren’t at risk of killing anyone with our false beliefs, but we are at risk of wasting many millions of dollars of developer resources on products that eventually fail in the marketplace.

In my experience, the idea of “fun” is a slippery, emotional concept that contains a whole set of interesting mental paradoxes - such as the fact that as a game buyer we want games to be hard, but as a player we want them to be easy. Because of this, “fun” is not something that we can really reason about logically so much as experience.

Think of it this way: Any given activity that you can think of will fall into one of four categories:

1. Things that neither you nor anyone else would find fun.
2. Things that you would find fun, but few others would.
3. Things that others would find fun, but you don’t.
4. Things that both you and other people would find fun.

Obviously, we want to avoid the first category, although there are a surprising number of games out there that seem to fall into it.

The second category is trickier. It’s easy for an enthusiast of a particular hobby, such as, say, scuba diving, to think that just because they enjoy it, everyone else will too. So unless you want to design games only for yourself, you do need to envision the mindset of your customers to some extent.

However, when we get to the third category, “things that other people might fun but you don’t”, the fact that you yourself don’t find it enjoyable should be taken as a warning sign. You need to ask yourself, why is it that you yourself don’t find it fun, and why shouldn’t that same reason apply to everyone else? Maybe in fact other people out there are closer to your mindset than you realize.

Now you might say, well - the reason that I don’t find this fun is because the “fun” part depends on hidden information. And since I, the designer, already know everything about the design, there is no hidden information, whereas if I didn’t already know the information then I would find this to be fun.

Unfortunately, there are so many flaws in this reasoning that I hardly know where to begin.

The first problem is that a design which depends on hidden information is not, in fact, a game - it is a puzzle. (I’m not talking about hidden information which is known by one player but not another in a multi-player game such as bridge - I’m talking about information which is hidden from the player by the designer.)

The problem with puzzles of this type is that they are disposable - use them once and throw them away. Once the player discovers the hidden information, the supposed fun (assuming that there every was any) is gone now. As we learned in the 80s and 90s, games which are essentially large and complex puzzles have effectively zero replay value, and have poor fun-to-cost ratios, both for the customer and for the developer.

This is even assuming that the game player doesn’t already know the hidden information before they even start. You can’t keep secrets in a mass market, and some secrets are so obvious that you don’t need to be told them.

And finally, you can’t really say “if I didn’t know the hidden information, I might find it fun”. First, because a hypothetical “you” who doesn’t know the hidden information is really a different person, and you can’t really know what that person would find enjoyable or not. Even if this “you” has the same basic personality and memories as the real you, you still can’t do it, because you have a fundamentally different vantage point. It’s like standing at the top of a building, and then picturing yourself at the foot of the building and trying to imagine what you would be seeing from there. You might get a rough sense of the general geometry of the scene, but you wouldn’t be able to imagine all of the details, or the general ambiance of the street.

So we come to category four, things which both you and other people would find fun. The best way to work in this category is not to sit around imagining things that are fun - but to go around having fun yourself. Of course, by “having fun” I don’t mean just take off and spend time at the amusement park - although, it might not be a bad idea - but rather a more restricted sort of having fun where you make up games for yourself and then play them. And if you find yourself playing them rather a lot, then you may be on to something.

In my view, there are two types of successful game designers: “formula hacks”, and “game players”. Formula hacks are people who don’t even try to design new kinds of games, they just re-use existing designs that are known to work. Most of their efforts are spent giving the design a new coat of paint, filing off the serial numbers, and generally upating the details without touching the essential core of the design. This may sound uncreative, but it works, and has a long and established history.

The other type of designer, the game player, is the type of person who basically has a lot of fun thinking up games and playing them. Very little of what they create is actually worthwhile, but because they create so many different designs, they can afford to only use the top ten percent and throw the rest away. They don’t try to put themselves in other people’s shoes, they don’t try to “imagine” what might be fun. They discover fun by experiencing it themselves.

Neither of these two types of successful game designer spends any effort thinking of fun things for other people to do.

Atheism is really Robert’s hot topic, not mine, but I wanted to comment on an article I recently discovered via Newstrust (which I highly recommend) entitled Myth: Atheism is Promoted By Church/State Separation & Religious Neutrality. In the article, the author is attempting to debunk the notion that by maintaining a strict separation between church and state, governments are actually promoting atheism.

I agree with the author this much: that by not promoting a specific religion, the government is not intentionally promoting atheism. But “intentionally promoting” is only a narrow interpretation of the word “promoting”, in that you can promote something without meaning to. The effects of not endorsing a specific religion are complex, and I would argue that in the long run, atheism does much better in an evironment in which there is no established religion.

First, there is the obvious point that in a state with an established religion, it is hard for other creeds or (dis)belief systems to gain a foothold, regardless of whether they be theist or atheist in nature.

However, there’s a more subtle point: Atheism is, in my view, a branch of Skepticism, which has a long and established philosophical history. The other main branch of skepticism is what you might call spiritual skepticism, which expresses doubts about the power of logic and human reason. This other branch is little known today, but was a major force in philosophy during the period of the Greek and Roman civilizations all the way up through the middle ages. Rational skepticism, which we know today, is just the opposite - it expresses doubts about our ability to know the supernatural, while maintaining a strong belief in the power of logic. The reason that this latter form of skepticism is so widespread today is because of the stunning success of the Enlightenment, that is, we live in a world in which logic and reason have been demonstrated to have great power. During the earlier period where we didn’t have such a good understanding of physics and the other sciences, it was possible (even reasonable) to claim that we would never be able to comprehend nature and the “workings of God”.

Despite the fact that these two forms of skepticism are mirror images of each other, they also have much in common.

If we look back over the source of history, we find an interesting pattern, which is that skepticism (in its modern, rational version as well as its historical, spiritiual version) tends to flourish in societies where there is a lot of competition between various faiths and worldviews.

In other words, if everyone around you believes exactly the same thing, then you’d likely come to the conclusion that there must be something to it; Whereas if everyone around you believes something different, but they all claim to know the absolute truth, then you’d know that majority must be wrong; And from there its only a small jump to thinking that they must all be wrong!

Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant? Suppose those six blind wise men came to you and reported their findings. One claims that it like a rope, another like a wall, and so on. Now you have to decide which one to believe. Would you simply pick one at random? Unlikely. Perhaps you have some preference as to which of the six men you consider the “wisest”. Maybe. But most likely of all, you would probably decide that they are all wrong, and that some phenomena had occurred which was beyond their understanding entirely.

Thus, a pluralistic society such as our own, in which there are a multitude of religious beliefs and many arguments over who has the “correct” belief, is exactly the kind of environment that fosters skepticism towards religion in general. And that tolerant, religiously diverse society would be impossible if there was a state-endorsed religion.

The irony here is that it is each religion’s insistence that they are right and all others are wrong that weakens their case; In an environment where each creed insists they alone know the truth, the more they assert this argument the less believable they become.

Which matches very well with my own experience talking to friends and co-workers about religion. I am far from the so-called “bible belt”, so clearly my social network is not representative of the country as a whole. But most of the people who I talk to seem to feel that religion is not only untrue, but unimportant - irrelevant. Not something that they really need to concern themselves with, except for the occasional political junkie who is concerned about the impact of religion on the political process.

I should also mention, it is because of this argument that skepticism flourishes in an environment in which there are competing belief systems, that I also believe that public schools should be allowed, if they wish, to offer religious instruction. I would only offer one restriction: That they must offer the students a choice of which religion they are taught! Or better yet, teach them more than one. No public school would be allowed to teach only a single religious view, there would be a “diversity requirement” for any religious curriculum such that the school must offer a wide enough range of viewpoints.

The benefits of this approach would allow students to extract much of the value of religion (and I would claim that there is much cultural and historical value to be gained), without instilling in them the poisonous dogmatic mindset that is responsible for much of our nation’s ills.

Turns out that praising your kids for their intelligence can actually make them achieve less, according to this New York Magazine article.

Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”

Dweck’s research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

In one, students are given two puzzle tests. Between the first and the second, they are offered a choice between learning a new puzzle strategy for the second test or finding out how they did compared with other students on the first test: They have only enough time to do one or the other. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather than use the time to prepare.

The number one take home lesson from this article? Be specific when you compliment your children. Don’t tell them how smart they are - compliment them on how hard they worked on that last homework problem.

A strange, and highly illustrated Stream of Consciousness.

“Puppies, Goldfish and Hamsters are a reliable source of how kids learn about death.”