Einstein vs Professor

My father (who is a lawyer by trade, as will later become relevant) recently got a facebook, and he posted this video to it.



I didn't know whether this was true or false, but I had suspicions about it. It sounds like one of those crappy e-mail urban legends, like the Declaration of Revocation of Independence, which occasionally purports to have been written by John Cleese. Luckily I was able to get to the bottom of this, and I went ahead and posted a comment:

ME

Interesting and insightful, but fictional.
http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp

But that was not the end of it. Oh, far from it.What follows is the discussion we had.

DAD

Interesting comment from Snopes. The author asserts that the story is "false," which is a positive statement of fact.

The evidence for the verdict, however, is that there is no record of the event ever having occurred in any Einstein biography or literature.

Is that proof that the story is false?

Or, does the Snopes author base her conclusion on her belief that if she cannot find any historical record of something, it must not have happened?

ME

Oh, come on.

Does it prove conclusively that the story is false? No. Negatives can't be proven, as you well know. Does it sufficiently demonstrate the improbability of the story to such an extent that they can comfortably assert its falsehood? Sure. And a convincing, evidence-supported narrative for how the story came about has been provided. This isn't a criminal trial. We don't need "beyond reasonable doubt" as our standard for evidence because we're not confronting the ethical concern of potentially punishing an innocent. Here, the gradation of probability matters.

It's fiction. It's also a misrepresentation of Einstein who, by more reliable historical accounts, was so woefully inarticulate as a child that he was thought retarded and who, by the way, went to a Catholic elementary school, rendering the premise of the atheist teacher situation even more improbable.

It's really annoying how in so many discussions concerning religious issues, all sides attempt to claim Einstein as their own (sort of like how a lot of political discussions eventually devolve into Hitler comparisons, a phenomenon known as Godwin's Law). During his adult life, he usually described himself as a Spinozist, and was highly annoyed when others would miscategorize his religious beliefs in an attempt to prove some kind of point (as though it would!). Doubtless he would be even further annoyed by this ad.

DAD

First, your point about "an appeal to Einstein" is well taken; it is a classic argumentum ad verecundiam (or appeal to authority) which is a well-recognized logical fallacy.

Having said that, it does not dispose of the child's response to the professor. Assuming arguendo that the account is entirely apocryphal with regard to Einstein, you don't really need the child to be Einstein for the child to get the better of the professor.

Third, I disagree with the breadth of the Snopes author's definition of faith. She says that faith involves only those propositions that cannot be proved. In fact, many people have faith in things that could very well be proved, although the "believer" is completely ignorant of the basis or process of the proof.

Consider flight, for example. Most airline passengers have no idea how or why an airplane takes off, flies, or lands. Yet they have faith in the technology of the aircraft and the skill of its crew. That's faith-- not because these processes are incapable of proof, but because the "believer" is almost entirely ignorant of the physical principles involved.

Using the author's definition of faith, by the way, wouldn't evolution be an article of faith?

Certainly there can be no absolute scientific proof of evolution. There may be evidence to support it, but there was plenty of evidence to support geocentrism before Copernicus and Galileo, no?

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. "By faith he received power to generate, even though he was past the normal age--and Sarah herself was sterile--for he thought that the one who had made the promise was trustworthy." (Heb. 11:1)

ME

The conversation between the child and the professor is a rather unsophisticated discussion of the problem of evil on both sides. It's no Karamazov, but it doesn't need to be. It's a commercial. So I don't really care so much about the content of the argument as I do the way it's being presented. Appealing to an urban myth as though it were a fact is an appallingly stupid way of making a point about what should and should not be taught in schools.

I also care nothing about the Snopes author's pontification on the nature of faith. Frankly I skimmed the article to get the gist of the Einstein debunking. But I suppose if you take that definition literally then perhaps you have to classify all inductive reasoning as faith. And you do have to classify trust in airlines, evolution, gravity, and frankly, the existence of, say, Kelly, as faith, because none of these things can be proven conclusively and we can always come up with a crazy, unfalsifiable science-fiction. Go ahead, Hume does.

But as you rightly point out, the Snopes author has a poor definition of faith. Even though Airline passengers can't explain how the plane works, they at least have a concept that air accidents are relatively unusual, which is grounded in objective statistical reality. We still have serious questions about how evolution works, but it is observable at the microscopic scale and follows from sound logic that is strongly supported at the macroscopic scale by the fossil record. Gravity is an observable phenomenon that has never served us wrong, although we still haven't managed to integrate it unto a general unified theory of reality. We've all known Kelly for years and she behaves like a real person with consciousness. Although we cannot conclusively demonstrate that she is not an extremely sophisticated automaton, it is highly improbable.

Probability. Remember?

This has gone way off topic. But I'm fine with you making evolution potshots as long as they're better potshots.

(I mean, not that I've ever heard any decent evolution potshots, and believe me I've tried. But maybe you've got something.)

DAD

Kelly exists.

Not sayin' her existence explains the presence of evil in the world or anything...

But I was there at 2:59 pm on Feb. 6, 1991, so I don't need to rely on Descartes, St. Paul, or Einstein on this one.

ME

Q.E.D.

The fact that he resorted to an irrelevant joke means I won, doesn't it? I think I'm going to count it as a win.

tawm.net no more

This blog is no longer tawm.net.

tawm.net now refers to my tumblr page, and this blog is rebranded as "The TawmBlog."

I highly recommend that, if you are subscribed to this feed, you unsubscribe and subscribe to the RSS feed for tawm.net.

There will still be content posted here, but it will also be cross-posted to tawm.net, so that means that this rss feed will either be inconplete or redundant (depending on whether you are subscribed to the other feed).

That is all!

Recent happenings

It's been a while since I've put anything here, but hey, new song.

That's right, I did a trock song in Videobloggery. Just watch it below.



Hopefully before to long I'll get back to more blogging and The Cloister Room...

Pascal's Wager and Volitional Belief

It's a bit unusual for me to blog about something like this, but why the hell not?

Pascal's Wager is sometimes called a proof of God's existence, but that's not really what it presents itself as. It's more of a thought experiment, and it goes a little something like this, in my own words:

Maybe we can't prove that God exists. But even so, it's better to believe in him just in case. There are four possible scenarios:

	you believe	you disbelieve
God exists	REWARD	PUNISHMENT
God does not exist	null	null

Obviously, then, believing in God is the right choice. It rules out the possibility of a negative outcome, leaving only positive and neutral.

There are problems with this thought experiment (or whatever we want to call it). They are obvious and they are not very interesting. Note the either-or proposition of God's existence, which does not allow for the fact that the god (or gods!) that exist might not be the one you believe in. And then there's the assumption that God rewards belief and punishes disbelief (which is kind of a silly thing to assume).

And then, of course, there's the fact that it's not a logical proof for God's existence, just a recommendation that you hedge your bets and choose to believe.

Again, not that interesting, and kind of obvious.

The interesting thing, in my opinion, is the notion that you can choose to believe in God. Can you choose to believe in anything? Because I sure can't. I believe those things that seem true to me and I do not believe those things which seem untrue to me. I can't just choose to believe that the sun will not rise tomorrow. Nor can I choose to believe that God does or does not exist.

Now, there's a pretty neat trick that human beings do called "lying to ourselves." You know what I'm talking about. You've done it before, and you've frustrated your loved ones. And you've been frustrated when your loved ones did it. The way this works is not so much by choosing to believe things, but rather choosing to alter our on mental filters. You can choose to ignore certain information, which has a bearing on a particular belief. In that way, you can trick yourself into "believing" whatever you want. It's called intellectual dishonesty.

By doing this, someone who really, deep down in their gut, believes in the existence of God, can trick themselves into believing that God does not exist, and vice versa. But I'm really not so much interested in the big question of God's existence as I am in the relationship between belief and the will.

I suppose I don't really have much of a point other than to muse on the issue. So I'll just sort of trail off here.

Decemberists at Newport and thoughts on The Hazards of Love

Music reviewing isn't really my usual thing, but I've got something to say, dammit, and say it I shall.

Last weekend was the Newport Folk Festival, which was celebrating its 50th year and featured a whole lot of good bands. I went with my sister and one of her friends, mainly to see the Decemberists, a favorite band of mine. If you're not familiar with the Decemberists, they're a folk rock band from Oregon that's heavily influenced by the tradition of English folk. A lot of their songs are stories about characters, and feature a verbose and anachronistic lyrical style that forms a large part of the band's charm.

One of the most prevalent themes in their music is tragic love. For examples, give a listen to "We Both Go Down Together," a song about a suicide pact between lovers, or "O Valencia!" which is a fairly standard Romeo and Juliet tale.

Incidentally, both of those songs were performed at the Newport Folk Festival, along with two all-new, never-before-performed-in-the-US songs, and a few songs from their new album The Hazards of Love, which is an album-length folk rock opera.

I had been a little worried that their entire set would be from The Hazards of Love, since their recent tour has featured a set list composed of just the tracks from that album in order, telling the complete story. I hadn't heard that album yet, and so a concert with all those songs and none of my favorites would have left me cold. But after hearing the songs performed at the concert, I immediately purchased the album from iTunes when I got home, so impressed was I with what I heard.

Now, I must admit that initially I was a little underwhelmed by the album on first listen, because while the songs were good, they did not benefit from the energy of the live show, and so I did not immediately fall in love wit the album. But on repeat listens, I have appreciated the album a lot more, and I've grown obsessed enough with it that I'm literally having trouble listening to anything else.

The Hazards of Love follows a trend in the work of singer/songwriter/frontman Colin Meloy toward long, epic song suites based in folk legend tropes. The 18-minute single The Tain in 2004 was one step in this direction, and the 2006 album The Crane Wife featured two such epic songs, "The Island" and the three parts of "The Crane Wife." The Hazards of Love seems the natural progression from those earlier works. By no means is it a particularly complicated (or even very specific) story, but it is touching in its own tragic way, and getting a sense of the narrative is absolutely key to the enjoyment of the album.

The story follows four characters. The lovers, Margaret and William, meet when Margaret helps a wounded fawn, which turns into a man by night: William. Margaret becomes pregnant with William's baby, which leads her to run away from home and also causes a disagreement between William and his mother the forest Queen. Soon after, the villainous Rake kidnaps Margaret and William must rescue her. I mentioned it was a tragedy, and I assure you it doesn't end well. The music incorporates a mix of folk and prog rock styles, and a few different vocalists, with Meloy playing both men and guest vocalists Becky Stark and Shara Worden portraying Margaret and the Queen respectively.

The long story, which requires some attention to follow, is probably why I didn't enjoy the album so much on my first listen, and it improved on later listens. I think this may be the most impressive album to date, but I don't think I want to see another one like it. I hope that Meloy returns to the shorter, lighter songs that made me fall in love with the band in the first place. If the songs the band played at Newport are any indication, that's just what they're doing, thankfully.

Oh, and by the way, some kind soul has uploaded the two brand new songs to youtube, so give them a listen: "Down by the Water" and "Rox in the Box". I'm a fan. Also, during the middle of their set, specifically during A Cautionary Song, most of the band came out into the audience to give a humorous reenactment of Bob Dylan's infamous 1965 performance at Newport. Luckily, that's up on youtube as well. I couldn't see it from my spot in the crowd but as they came out into the crowd they did walk literally right in front of me (just inches away, really) so that was kind of cool.

If you're a fan of the Decemberists highly recommend that you give The Hazards of Love a listen, or even a few listens. If you've nto familiar with them, however, then I'd recommend that you listen to some of their other, less ambitious, more accessible material. Personally, while I'm glad that the band didn't perform The Hazards of Love in its entirety at Newport, I'd be curious to hear it performed live, just to find out what the experience is like.

Oh, and sadly, I left the festival early and so I missed the big finale where a bunch of people (including Meloy and Ben Kweller and others) joined Pete Seeger on stage for This Land is Your Land. Ah well. I'll probably lie and tell my grandkids I was there.