Awwww, how nice. The section about Luke_2011 in God in Proof is rather flattering:
While I was in Los Angeles attending William Lane Craig’s classes at Biola, I got in touch with Luke Muehlhauser, the author of one of my favorite [blogs about arguments over the existence of God], Common Sense Atheism. He suggested that we meet at Peet’s Coffee in the food court of the Glendale Galleria, a gaudy shopping mall. A few minutes ahead of schedule, I got a text message: I have arrived. I’m the only 6’6” guy with spiky black hair. -Luke. It was true; I had no problem finding him. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt decorated with a florid graphic, like you’d buy on a boardwalk. We got our coffees and sat down at a table to talk.
Luke and I were the same age — twenty-six — and, without ever having studied it formally, he knew way more philosophy. He grew up in small-town Minnesota, a devoted Christian and the son of a pastor, always pushing himself toward as much holiness as he could manage. In college he studied counseling psychology but became disenchanted with it and dropped out of school before graduating. That was when his faith began to slip. He started learning about the historical Jesus in order to know his savior better, but what he found had the opposite effect. In came doubts, and they wouldn’t go away. He turned to the apologetics industry in order to buttress his belief in God, but discovering the arguments of David Hume helped clinch it. The blog he kept then, What God Taught Me Today, is still online as a record of his last days as a Christian. He says he finally became an atheist on January 11, 2007. “I feel like I’ve been born again, again,” he wrote a few days later. But it wasn’t easy. There was a big task ahead of him.
Luke left Minnesota and moved to L.A., where, when we met, he was making a living setting up computer networks for businesses. But he did that as little as possible — around thirty-five hours a week, and less if he could manage. His real work was the self-education-in-public that was happening on his website. Day to day, Luke was building a worldview. The big priorities at first were answering, in detail, the best theistic arguments he could find. He also needed to develop a compelling moral theory consistent with his atheism. Since launching Common Sense Atheism in late 2008, Luke has posted podcast interviews with philosophers, extended book reviews, and bibliographies of academic articles, linked to PDFs when possible. His readership became large and loyal; it’s not uncommon for more than a hundred comments to appear on a post. Many of the readers are philosophy graduate students and professors, and lots more are apologetic hobbyists on either side of the big divide.
What he does best is explicate arguments clearly, fairly, and respectfully. Sometimes he deals with the familiar ones of Plantinga and Craig, and sometimes he helps promote lesser-known thinkers. He’s willing to criticize atheists as much as theists. “Irrationality and non-rationality are not religious conditions,” Luke told me. “They’re part of the human condition.” They’re also what he wants to minimize as much as possible in himself. He’s intent on being wrong as little as possible...
We talked for two breathless hours over our coffees — shop talk about philosophy of religion, mostly — and by then I thought that out of politeness I should let him go. I thanked him for the conversation and began to gather my things. But as I got up to leave, he said, “I wouldn’t mind talking more if you want.”
I thought about it for a second, looked at him, saw he was serious, and took off my jacket. I only stipulated that we walk while we talked. And so we did, for five more hours after that, about exalted things, among the mall’s chain stores and loiterers, stopping only for a snack of jalapeño-covered Wetzel’s pretzels and iced tea. We talked and talked through one proof after another — their strengths and weaknesses, what they mean, and what we know about the people who thought of them...
As the “virtuous atheist” of The Hague was said to be, Luke is earnest, gracious, and curious. He listens hard and well, then asks generous questions that make one want to open up and tell all. They’re questions through and through, but they feel like compliments. His eyes squint as he thinks.
Now that he had found a purpose in philosophy, he regretted having dropped out of college, because it meant he couldn’t apply to graduate school and become a professor. But he said he could just as easily move to some cheap, faraway basement in the desert and keep on doing his research over the Internet. Already, anyway, he had accomplished what not many PhD’s can claim; he had the attention and respect of some top people in his field. He was having long, in-depth conversations with them on his podcasts. William Lane Craig has even used Luke’s material in class. Yet the more Luke was getting settled in his new worldview, the less interested he was in religion. He was writing and thinking more and more about things like artificial intelligence, meta-ethics, and neuroscience...
After the sun had set in the skylights overhead, the last two hours of our conversation turned a little torturous. We had been talking about these ideas and proofs and consequences in the abstract, and we had agreed on most things. But now he wanted to know more about what I believe, and where I stand, and what conclusions I had come to. What was the content of my Catholicism? This was what I dreaded. I could talk about God as love, as community, or as a presence beyond being. I could tell him about the nun I know with the secret ministry to transgender folks, or teach him the tune to a hymn I like to sing before bed— these are the content of my faith. But he would only ask what that means in terms of proofs. I could defer to unknowing and mystery, but he kept pushing me for clarity— gently, but pushing. I tried one tack, and my wind would die, and I’d try again. And the wind would die. That was the best I could do. He stood several inches taller than me to begin with, but I was starting to feel especially small.
Finally, seven hours after we began, night long since fallen and the mall nearly deserted, we made our way to the parking structure and said good-bye. I sat for a while in the car I was borrowing from a friend, a new and newly cleaned Civic, and I wrote down as much as I could remember of what had gone between us. As I wrote I couldn’t escape a feeling of being a living contradiction, and of sadness…
[Luke] had helped hold down the winged words I might otherwise get away with, before the wax they’re made of could melt in the sun. The unexamined life is not worth living, nor the unexamined God worth believing. I remain, thank God, no less than ever a question to myself, and God remains a question for me.
Richard Rhodes—“Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb”
The title says it all—a book about the development of hydrogen bomb, in both its American and its Russian incarnation. The book is the sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (which is really great).
The book roughly starts where its predecessor ended, and tells the story of the main characters in the Manhattan project, and how they started work on the Next Big Thing—the hydrogen bomb, as invented by Ulam/Teller. The book is a bit less about the science and more about the politics of the H-bomb project, but still there are quite a few details—though the DIY-crowd might need some more...
The book also details the Russian parallel development, first of their own atom-bomb and then also the h-bomb, and how they were much helped by espionage, in particular from Klaus Fuchs, who came off very lightly, and ended his days in the DDR.
Overall, slightly (only slightly!) less interesting than its predecessor, still a great read. Well-researched and detailed, but also very interesting—esp. if you’re interested in politics.
Just came across the book Behavior Modification in Applied Settings, which I don’t think has been mentioned on Less Wrong previously. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks like it could be useful for those of us interested in boosting productivity and personal effectiveness.
Jon Ronson—“The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry ”
Some light reading about psychopaths (!) --how are people diagnosed to be psychopaths (often using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist), can this 1% of the population be cured (apparently, to a large extent the answer is “no”). In between, the author solves some kind of mystery, discusses some fun therapies from the 70s, and chats with some psychopaths-or-not, and the famous Rosenhan experiment makes an appearance.
Once more, the stereotype of psychiatry as an, at best, proto-scientific field is evoked. Not a bad book, good for a light read on a long flight.
Maxwell’s deduction of the probability distribution over the velocity of gas molecules—”one of the most important passages in physics” (Truesdell)—presents a riddle: a physical discovery of the first importance was made in a single inferential leap without any apparent recourse to empirical evidence.
Tychomancy proposes that Maxwell’s derivation was not made a priori; rather, he inferred his distribution from non-probabilistic facts about the dynamics of intermolecular collisions. Further, the inference is of the same sort as everyday reasoning about the physical probabilities attached to such canonical chance setups as tossed coins or rolled dice. The structure of this reasoning is investigated and some simple rules for inferring physical probabilities from symmetries and other causally relevant properties of physical systems are proposed.
Not only physics but evolutionary biology and population ecology, the science of measurement error, and climate modeling have benefited enormously from the same kind of reasoning, the book goes on to argue. Inferences from dynamics to probability are so “obvious” to us, however, that their methodological importance has been largely overlooked.
Free 300 page PDF that contains a variety of solved exercises from propositional and predicate logic. Description from the authors:
One obvious use of this work is as a solutions manual for readers of Logic: The Laws of Truth—but it should also be of use to readers of other logic books. Students of logic need a large number of worked examples and exercise problems with solutions: the more the better. This volume should help to meet that need.
Nonfiction Books Thread
Awwww, how nice. The section about Luke_2011 in God in Proof is rather flattering:
Richard Rhodes—“Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb”
The title says it all—a book about the development of hydrogen bomb, in both its American and its Russian incarnation. The book is the sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (which is really great).
The book roughly starts where its predecessor ended, and tells the story of the main characters in the Manhattan project, and how they started work on the Next Big Thing—the hydrogen bomb, as invented by Ulam/Teller. The book is a bit less about the science and more about the politics of the H-bomb project, but still there are quite a few details—though the DIY-crowd might need some more...
The book also details the Russian parallel development, first of their own atom-bomb and then also the h-bomb, and how they were much helped by espionage, in particular from Klaus Fuchs, who came off very lightly, and ended his days in the DDR.
Overall, slightly (only slightly!) less interesting than its predecessor, still a great read. Well-researched and detailed, but also very interesting—esp. if you’re interested in politics.
Just came across the book Behavior Modification in Applied Settings, which I don’t think has been mentioned on Less Wrong previously. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks like it could be useful for those of us interested in boosting productivity and personal effectiveness.
Jon Ronson—“The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry ”
Some light reading about psychopaths (!) --how are people diagnosed to be psychopaths (often using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist), can this 1% of the population be cured (apparently, to a large extent the answer is “no”). In between, the author solves some kind of mystery, discusses some fun therapies from the 70s, and chats with some psychopaths-or-not, and the famous Rosenhan experiment makes an appearance.
Once more, the stereotype of psychiatry as an, at best, proto-scientific field is evoked. Not a bad book, good for a light read on a long flight.
Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure by Michael Strevens (a philosophy professor at NYU). From the blurb:
There is also a brief chapter summary here.
Would you recommend it?
Logic: The Drill by Nicholas J.J. Smith and John Cusbert.
Free 300 page PDF that contains a variety of solved exercises from propositional and predicate logic. Description from the authors: