“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”

That’s your quote for the day, taken horribly out of context. It’s also my excuse for not updating for something like 9 months.

 

What I’m Thinking Right Now

I’m not sure how I feel about the upcoming week.

I pretty much know my tasks at hand: take care of class government responsibilities, take care of statistics HW, do philosophy reading, work on CS, and work on getting that internship for the summer (optional), work at job, and work for debate tournament. The difficulty is not that I have a fuzzy idea of what the week ahead will look like. I can’t see too many curveballs coming my way (though if a curveball does come, the fact that I haven’t seen its source may mean that it’ll be particularly bad). The difficulty is that it is an outrageous amount to take care of in a week (especially the killer CS + debate combination).

In all honestly, I often prefer the weeks that are low work but high stress (with plenty of curveballs in my life), but after going through two of those before break, it’ll be nice to just strap in and just take care of the massive piles of work piling up, one by one, without worrying so much about what my next move is.

Anyway, I better call it a night. Sleep’s going to be a luxury this week.

 

A Thought or Two or Six

1) The primary problem with Intelligent Design, as I see it, is that it aims to seek refuge in a science classroom when, in fact it lacks a key tenet of any scientific theory: it must be falsifiable. That is, it must clearly predict what will happen in a spanking new laboratory experiment we perform tomorrow. If the prediction fails, the theory falls. Evolutionary theory allows us to do just this. Based on the principle of natural selection, it predicts that if you expose bacteria to a narrow range of antibiotics, assuming natural conditions, the strain in your petri dish will eventually be resistant. I’m curious to know what a theory based on the idea that “some things happen because of an intelligent being” would predict about the bacteria sample. How do you tell if this is one of the “some things”? If it is, how can we use this to predict what our intelligent agent will do next with this bacterial sample?

2) It strikes me as regrettable that the religious base which has supported ID over evolutionary theory sees it as a zero-sum game where the existence of one idea weakens the other. Just because creationism or ID cannot live within the realm of strict science doesn’t mean there’s no home for spirituality or metaphysics in the broader sense, given how few of our deepest philosophical questions have convincing answers. I’d expand on that thought, but I’ll save my points for until I read the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in A Single Atom (apparently, the guy says that if science changes, our view of the world has to change with it, regardless or prior doctrine… how often do you hear such a statement from a religious leader?) . In any event, I think it’s unfortunate that there’s a misconception in some circles that evolutionary theory “disproves” God.

3) Props to ID proponents for not only their modest victory in the classroom, but also – especially - for their PR victory in the media. If you take a survey of prominent biologists, I’d venture to guess that over 95% of them support solely teaching evolution. You’d only expect, then, that ID would stand no shot, that it would immediately be ridiculed and crushed. Yet we’ve seen large nation wide debates. I think the biggest victory of ID advocates has been the creation of a debate to begin with – to give the impression that this is a largely unresolved issue. If you define winning as success in getting local, state, and even national policy makers talking about what really should be a non-issue, there’s no loss here. I may not agree with their position, but I recognize their genius when I see it.

4) When I see liberals make arguments pro-evolution on Facebook groups and places like Digg, it disheartens me that these are the guys on my camp. Even with the facts seemingly on their side, liberals tend to be fairly bad at convincing others, if only because they often argue condescendingly. Conservatives tend to be far more articulate and organized with their arguments. And indeed, this is something whose importance that some conservative camps – notably evangelicals – recognize already.

5) Apple has a killer PR machine. For one, they have Steve Jobs, whose charisma is remarkable and probably played no small part in the success of the iPhone (which even my Mom wants). They’ve also been quite aggressive at striking out against NBC in the latest controversy over pricing. And just take a look at the top Digg stories of the day.

Seven of the top ten stories. If their engineers are half as sharp as their marketing folks, maybe I should’ve purchased a Mac after all.

6) Really looking forward to Princeton. I have big plans for next year, starting with a very busy first week. See you Princetonians there!