We are all familiar with the “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” expression. Supposedly medieval scholars were quite serious about this issue. I never gave the expression any thought but if you think about it, this boggles the mind. Exactly what was the debate? Are angles supposed to be very small? Did someone made a calculation and claimed that the correct number was 39? Was this debate about the size of angels? the weight of angels? the dancing skills of angels?

Wikipedia to the rescue. According to this entry, most likely there never was such a debate. It was made up just to mock the scholastic scholars. Ok, I didn’t know that.

Jerry Coyne 寫的 “Why Evolution is True” 毫無疑問是有關演化論最好的科普書籍, 我認為比 Dawkins 的 Greatest Show on Earth 要好得太多了. 我大力推薦給大家.

我今天才知道這本書已經有簡體中文的翻譯了. 書名叫做 “為什麼要相信達爾文”. 有興趣的人可以找來讀.

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucc posted another entry about science and philosophy. Again, he insists that scientists don’t know how to think properly. He also said that scientists are arrogant and love money. Keep it classy, professor. Maybe we scientists don’t know how to do “analysis and questioning that include dialectics and logical argumentation” (which he claims only philosophers know how to do), but at least we don’t play dirty.

Here he argues that philosophy, like science, makes progress:

Another common misconception is that philosophy, unlike science, doesn’t make progress. This is simply not true, unless one measures progress by the (scientific) standard of empirical discovery. [...] Philosophy makes progress because dialectical analysis generates compelling objections to a given position, which lead to either an improvement or the abandonment of said position, which is followed by more critical analysis of either the revised position or of the new one, and so on. For instance, ethical theories (moral philosophy), or theories about consciousness (philosophy of mind), or about the nature of science (philosophy of science), have steadily progressed so that no contemporary professional philosopher would consider herself a utilitarian in the original sense intended by Jeremy Bentham, or a Cartesian dualist, or a Popperian falsificationist — just in the same way in which no scientist today would defend Newtonian mechanics, or the original version of Darwin’s theory.

That isn’t very convincing. Imagine an alchemist making the same argument about alchemy: “Of course alchemy makes progress. A year ago everybody thought that slowly heating up silver in a pile of horse shit according to the principles of kabala would turn it into gold. After Dr. Dee published his new interpretation of the Sefer Yetzirah, nobody believes that anymore. Now we use mercury and bat shit. That’s progress.” No that isn’t. Replacing a theory with something else is not progress. That something else has to be, at least occasionally, so insightful that its significance is not simply justified by answering questions in its own problem domain.

I agree with Pigliucci that progress does not need to be evaluated by empirical discovers. The accomplishment of mathematics, for example, is not evaluated by an empirical metric but nobody doubts that its progress is significant. However, it must be measurable in some way otherwise it deserves no respect. Pigliucci offers none. It’s interesting that he mentioned consciousness. According to him, philosophy of mind makes some progress because nobody considers himself a Cartesian dualist anymore. Say what? Descartes lived in the 1600s. It took philosophers 400 years to figure that one out? Some progress.

Furthermore, if philosophy makes progress and replaces Bentham, Descartes and Popper with something else, why are students of philosophy still reading them* in their original form? I studied newtonian mechanics and evolution in college but I didn’t read any Newton nor Darwin. I did not even read a quote by Newton or Darwin. Their theories are reformulated to reflect … the progress.

* And why are science students forced to read them in general education classes?

All the deep conspiracies, dazzling erudition, and paranoia of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum condensed into just 128 pages. However, there is something unique about Lot 49 that sets it apart from the rest of “hysterical realism” lot. While Eco rummaged through every single cliche in the garbage bin known as conspiracy theory to find inspirations for plot elements, Pynchon’s central conspiracy is truly bizarre and obscure. These days you encounter Knight Templars and Freemasons everywhere*, from comic books to TV shows, but I have yet to see a single reference to Thurn und Taxis in popular culture. The fact that Turns und Taxis seems to be so unrelated to anything in the world, so faceless, so invisible, makes it much more sinister.

The most refreshing part of The Crying of Lot 48 is its setting. The world of Foucault’s Pendulum is that of academics (in very old European universities). Graduate students holding their thick folders of papers running between lecture halls and libraries. Textbook editors sipping latte in a sidewalk coffee shop. The world of Lot 48, on the other hand, is entirely down-to-earth and unromantic. It’s set in southern california for heaven’s sake! Thomas Pynchon, despite his impenetrable mystique, can write convincingly about the mundane modern life, not the pick-up-your-clothes-from-the-dry-cleaner, Seinfeld kind of hip mundaneness but the really dirty stuff: property developments and stock holder meetings. Extramarital affairs and hollywood has-beens. The fact that the heroine is situated in a normal, non-abstract world gives the outrageous turns of event a grittiness not found in a typical book in this genre.

Despite its age, The Crying of Lot 49 is still refreshing and edge-cutting. It’s also relentless funny and irreverent.

* I once met a Knight Templar traveling from Los Angeles to San Diego on an Amtrek Pacific Surfliner.

sgriob – a Gaelic word meaning “the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky”.

cwrw – pronounced “koo-roo”, means beer in Welsh

giomlaireachd – a highland Scottish word meaning “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes”.

Theses are from Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue.

I set up a anobii account, in case anyone is interested.

It’s called Go.

I never liked the “New Jersey school” of software engineering too much, but there’s something very charming about the kind of thing they make. For example, in this document, Rob Pike says that one of the design principles of the Go language is “no stuttering”. Things like “foo.Foo *myFoo = new foo.Foo(foo.FOO_INIT)” are avoided.

I think he is spot on. Stuttering is exactly the right term for this type of Smalltalk-flavored syntax.

This is from one of the Zork books, Conquest at Quendor.

From this short piece published in ScienceNow:

Lévi-Strauss introduced “structuralism” to anthropology–the concept that all societies follow certain universal patterns of thought and behavior, as exemplified in their myths. Anthropologists say his way of looking at human culture did away with conceptions of indigenous groups as having “savage” or “primitive” minds–as well as the corollary view that Western civilization is uniquely advanced. Lévi-Strauss’s way of re-conceptualizing anthropology–informed by what he called the “three mistresses” of geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism–helped shape trends in social sciences and literary theory, and influenced intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Psychoanalysis and Marxism?? Are you kidding me? I was nodding along and I was all “ok ok…did away with primitive minds… that’s cool… western civilization not unique, sure I can see that” and then BANG! Psychoanalysis, and Marxism. You can record some humongous N400 brainwave from my scalp if you put electrodes on me. Totally unexpected from the context.

You can’t be a scientist if you pledge allegiance to a certain ideology, even if you call them your intellectual mistresses. I don’t think I am too interested in this dude.

What was I thinking when I recommended Massimo Pigliucci’s blog a few weeks ago? He immediately posted something stupid and annoying. In an entry titled “On the scope of skeptical inquiry“, Pigliucci said that

Consider again the example of a creationist who maintains in the face of evidence that the universe really is 6,000 years old, and that it only looks older because god arranged things in a way to test our faith. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that could contradict that sort of statement, but a philosopher can easily point out why it is unreasonable, and that furthermore it creates very serious theological quandaries.

Yes, a philosopher can easily point out why last-thursdayism is unreasonable, but a scientist can’t? Scientific theories with no empirical evidence are proposed all the time and scientists seem to have no problem making decisions about which direction to pursue. Pigliucci insists that Richard Dawkins is “doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry” by making atheism a scientific position. Why? We rejected ether. We rejected phlogiston. We rejected ESP. We rejected soul. Why is it any different when it comes to god?

Furthermore, what really annoys me is the undertone of Pigliucci’s piece: scientists should restrict themselves playing with their test tubes and leave all the deep thinking to the philosophers, the professional thinkers. You see, philosophers are really good at thinking, because that’s all that they do. They think. Thinking is apparently the one thing that scientists can’t do properly.

The problem is that philosophers really don’t have a good track record. When was the last time a scientist said “look, I think we are stepping outside our epistemological boundary here. Why don’t we knock on the doors of our smarter colleagues in the philosophy department and see if they can sort this out for us?” Three hundred years ago? Scientists are faced with deep mysteries all the time. For example, cognitive scientists are faced with the “problem” with consciousness. We don’t know what it is. We don’t have a framework to work with when it comes to consciousness. Philosophers are supposed to be experts on this kind of thing. Maybe they can help? Nope. We checked and it turns out that they are clueless too. They have tons of arguments, thought experiments and endless streams of bickering and nitpicking. But nothing concrete. Nothing useful.

When theoretical physicists are faced with deep problems, they very often discover that mathematicians already developed all the tools for describing the problem, and sometimes for solving the problem. It is famously called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. Philosophy, on the other hand, is almost the opposite. They miraculously managed to contribute nothing to science for a few hundred of years. I call this “the unreasonable useless of philosophy in natural sciences”. I have no idea why this is the case but it is.

Becker and Fagen got the name Steely Dan from this passage in Naked Lunch:

Mary is strapping on a rubber penis. “Steely Dan III from Yokohama,” she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room. “Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don’t go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa….”