The Long Cut

Category: science

  • Thoughts on Dawkins

    Just wanted to highlight an excellent article on Neuroanthropology about Richard Dawkins.

    Neuroanthropology: Richard Dawkins on ‘Elders’

    I saw Dawkins speak in October and was very non-plussed by the whole experience, since then I’ve wanted to write a very similar article. The article captures what I wanted to say with eloquence. This piece is not just reflective of Dawkins but a larger cultural trend. When he was at IU, he answered a barrage of pretty terrible questions from a mostly groveling audience. (“I am an atheist, but you are my God” was said and is admittedly the most ridiculous exemplar, but the general tone was maintained.)

    One of the key problems is that Dawkins seems to rail against a very particular kind of theism – that of the omnipotent, omnipresent “guy in the sky” which can rail down thunder and lightning in a feverish outbreak of fury. I don’t think that’s what the majority of people conceptualize when they see the divine. When Dawkins answered a question about life’s purpose, he got at what a lot of people agree with – a general sense of wonder and marvel at the infinite complexity of life, and the immense grandiosity of the universe.

    Also, he asserted that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other religious leaders have no problem with evolution and their faith coexisting. You cannot study biology without evolution, and to accept creationism as scientific fact is raw ignorance. Instead of focusing arguments on polarization like theism vs. atheism, why not just strike at the core? Ignorance and bigotry are terrible in any incarnation, but are not a direct result of having any theistic conviction.

    If Dawkins (and other new atheists) aim to make the world more “scientific” the emphasis should not be on any epistemological claim that replaces religious belief with scientific “belief”. Rather, they should teach people to engage the world, to challenge their beliefs, wrestle with them and question them. By teaching people to accept science as something “to believe in”, we gain nothing except struggles when scientific “doctrine” is found to be a misunderstanding – as has happened at countless junctures in the history of science. By teaching engagement we can challenge our assumptions boldly and discover the next step on the long path to truth. Carl Sagan puts this desire eloquently on the first pages of Cosmos: “If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

  • Computer Science

    Indiana University’s Department of Computer Science has been completely absorbed by the School of Informatics (SoI). I’m not entirely comfortable with this decision, as what we do in Computer Science (theory and algorithms) is very different from Informatics (applications to other areas). Also, Computer Science students are a very different breed from Informatics students – there’s a number of differences in the curriculum.

    Anyways, the new SoI bulletin has completely revised the BS CS degree program. It is now much more streamlined. Core courses have been reduced from 6 to 4 and upper-level requirements have been reduced from 7 courses divided amongst various first letter and second number distinctions to 5 courses in a simplified concentration. My concentrations will be Artificial Intelligence and Programming Languages.

    These changes have dramatically altered the next three years. I was 5 CS courses away from graduation. Under the new requirements I have only 3 more, which can be from a broad list of related courses. Instead of taking every undergrad CS course, I’m now going to be able to take Artificial Life, Bioinspired Computing, The Computer and Natural Language (NLP), and Search Informatics: Google Under the Hood (MapReduce). These have all been on my radar, but since they were in the Informatics program, they did not meet any CS requirements. Now I’m able to shave a semester off my graduation and take some (hopefully) more interesting courses.

    There are some issues with the changes – there is a lot less emphasis on theory, which is the hallmark of the IU CS program. Since I’m staying on an extra year for the Professional Masters program I’m not concerned about my education, but it is alarming that people can get away with only 6 CS courses when the old program required 13. (I’ll graduate with 10.)

    At any rate, I’ll be out by Fall 2011 instead of sometime in 2012, and that’s awesome.

  • Most Influential

    What is your biggest influence?

    It’s an open question – the {noun} that most influenced your calling/work/studies/career/purpose/etc to date: book, article, movie, paper, film, photo, story, person, relative, musician, artist, website, event, gadget, activity, anything! What’s the one thing that got you into what you’re into?

    For me it’s the Towards 2020 Science Report (2.3MB PDF). The buzz I had after reading this report was incredible. We are standing literally on the precipice of scientific revolution – just as the discovery of algebra and calculus prompted the scientific revolutions of ages past, the development of computation is completely changing how we can look at the universe. Everything can be modeled. We can create “artificial scientists”. This awesomeness is why I do artificial intelligence.

    Right now – what is that thing? What is your biggest influence? What sparks your fire?

    Edit: Had to republish and refocus on school/career/interests – in the grand scheme of things there are other influences of greater or equal stature. 🙂