The Happy Moron

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. — Michelangelo

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come. – Michelangelo

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all. –Michelangelo

I believe that there is a single God who created everything.

I believe, since all things are created by him, that all things were first conceived by him.

I believe that since all things are conceived by him, that all things reflect him and are products of his character and nature.

A beam that keeps a roof above my head is strong; it reflects the strength of God. A swan is graceful; it reflects the beauty of God. The sun is brilliant; it reflects the splendour of God.

But I also believe that the world we see has been corrupted, and that, although it retains the character and nature of God, it has been twisted, bent and warped away from what God originally made. In all things, we see decay, corrosion, frailty, illness and death.

Therefore, the things we see are a blend from two sources, and we must study the nature of God in order to understand and make sense of the things we see, to separate the divine reflection from the dross.

The question I have is stated in the title of this post:

Why are hard things hard?

By Michelangelo’s own testimony, his art is the product of countless hours of hard work. It would have been impossible for him to sculpt and paint the things he did without this.

He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year — Leonardo da Vinci

We know that excellence is the product of much effort; that talent requires development; that things of value are hard won. It is foolishness to think otherwise.

But why? What aspect of God’s character does this reflect – this, slow, painstaking (notice the meaning of the word – taking pains) accrual of something worthwhile?

Or is it God’s character at all? Is it perhaps a corruption of sin and death?

Why are hard things hard?

Great video on Chris Blattman’s blog.

Well worth the time.

Jerk Wars are what the Internet is best at.

Westboro Baptist Church vs. Some Nerds.

Recently I commented about a backlash against a cultural church. Well… I guess this is it.

The best description I can come up for this is a war. It is essentially destructive action on both sides, and like any war, there is collateral damage.

Today’s Non Sequitur

The Kingdom of God is such a departure from life as we know it that we can’t even conceive of what it’s like.

That’s one of the reasons that we can’t build such a thing ourselves.

It’s also the reason that “It doesn’t make sense to me” or “I don’t understand how it could possible turn out all right” are not valid excuses for ignoring or disobeying God.

At first, Godblock upset me.

It left me feeling hurt and sad, so much so that I had to put a link to it and see what others thought.

Looking at the site a second time, it could be a joke. Certainly it’s vaporware, because if you try and download it, you get a message saying that it’s not ready yet.

But whether a joke or in earnest, it’s worth looking at.

I don’t think it’s particularly satanic, at least… no more than regular human sinful behaviour is satanic.

I don’t think it’s particularly post-modern.

I interpret Godblock as the result of a particular attitude that is prevalent among many computer programmers and, dare I say, geeks. If you read programming blogs or forums or news sites, you see this attitude popping up all over the place. Just browse any Slashdot thread where intelligent design is mentioned and you’ll see this attitude manifest very, very quickly.

It’s an attitude that values, “smart”. It’s an attitude that attaches no small degree of pride to being smart. It brings a certain belligerence towards the stupid and, ultimately, I think it’s an attitude that comes out of a lot of suffering. I’ll say more on this in a bit, but first…

Why is GodBlock considered smart?

The idea of a filter blocking religious content is clever. It’s clever because it’s ironic. Filtering harmful content is something that religious zealots of all stripes do, so turning the tables on them is a brilliant stroke to be rewarded.

It’s smart because it takes advantage of what a clever person can do with computers. It relies on technical chops.

And finally, it’s smart because it protects smart things.

“Fundamentalist Evangelicals, Mormons, Baptists, Muslims, and Jews have held back progress in science, human rights, civil rights, and protecting our environment.”

Science, human rights, civil rights, protecting the environment… These are considered to be “Smart Things” in programming circles. Especially science. I’m surprised Scientologists don’t get a look in here.

GodBlock is attractive on these grounds.

But at the same time, it’s an example of smart being used as a weapon.

Where the Attitude comes from

I’m not sure I can definitively say where it comes from. It’s not a post-modern attitude. It’s an aggressive, “Science is right and smart is right and stupid need not apply” attitude, which is a great deal different than the post modern one.

In technical or scientific arguments, someone is right and someone is wrong and usually it’s the smarter person who is right. If you pin your career on being smart and on being right, it means that you have to be intolerant of wrong answers and decisive in quashing them. If you ever get involved in technical arguments on the internet, this culture is greatly magnified, because nothing spreads quite so quickly as wrong answers. Stupid people on the internet can do a lot of wrong.

When stupid people win arguments, the logic goes, projects suffer and the work suffers and the smart people suffer under stupid situations. Everybody loses.

The reason I think it’s an attitude born of suffering is because I think across North America, there’s been a great deal of suffering at the hands of a cultural Church which has elevated dogma, culture, and tradition over reason and true faith. There is a huge amount of patronizing, simplistic, false Christian media out there.

A backlash can be expected. Yes, it is ugly. Yes, it is aggressive. Yes, it is misguided. But it’s an understandable backlash and perhaps a predictable backlash, and perhaps even an avoidable backlash. For this reason, I don’t think it’s any more satanic than our regular human delusion is satanic.

There are a lot of techies out there who rail violently against web censorship of any kind, and who understand that, for technical reasons alone, Godblock is futile and useless. It is the wrong answer to the problem. I don’t think Godblock (even if it’s real) will ever get much traction at all from professional computer folk.

But there might be quite a few who would agree that it’s the wrong answer to the right problem.

(If you want to see a good example of what I think is behind Godblock, look at this post by Tim Bray, alpha geek and creator of XML)

It’s time to learn why you can’t trust anything on the internet.

Today we’re going to dive into the world of statistics and have a look at Selection Bias. And because we’re talking about the internet, we’re going to demonstrate the principle of selection bias by looking at Blaxploitation films on IMDB.

I’ve listed below the ratings and vote counts of four marvelous examples of the genre.

Looking at these numbers, they don’t look horrible, all things considered. The most popular, Black Belt Jones, weighs the scales at a respectable 6.0 with 805 and five votes. Looks good, huh?

There’s only one problem. Black Belt Jones is *not* a 6.0 film. Trust me, folks (and don’t ask me how I know).

What this 6.0 *really* means is not that the film is a 6.0 film. It means that the dedicated fans of the genre who took the trouble to hunt down this difficult to find, niche film, and who cared enough to vote gave it a six. The people voting on this film are people who are predisposed to like it.

The numbers only get worse from here – 5.8, 5.7, 4.3 – but the really gruesome numbers are the vote counts. Trust me, you don’t want to take the word of those 94 people… they are the wrong 94 people to listen to about this film.

That, in a nutshell, is selection bias. This is why you can’t trust anything on the internet, because *everything* on the internet is heavily subject to selection bias. Well, you can, but…

It means you might wind up watching Black Samson one night.

If I linked to the depression that is Godblock, I should link to something nice:

A godly man being paid a compliment by quite a cynical secularist.

Thanks, Oracle.

“Deploying coherent packages of software functionality as loosely coupled, coarse-grained services delivers dramatically improved application flexibility, allowing enterprises to continuously adapt constellations of services to keep IT capabilities aligned with business goals.”

If I ever want to “continuously adapt constellations of services”, I’ll let you know.

How does this make you feel?

Thoughts? Comments? Feelings?