The QOTD, on the limits of reason:

“The third problem, that of conflict between knowledge and rationality… is often called the dilemma of ultimate commitment and the problem of presuppositions.

The problem is crucial, not only because no one has seemed able to solve it but because the Christian commitment of many Protestants depends upon the assumption that it cannot be solved. For the argument provides a rational excuse for irrational commitment… It argues that (1) for certain logical reasons, rationality is so limited that everyone must make a dogmatic irrational commitment; (2) therefore, the Christian has a right to make whatever commitment he pleases; and (3) therefore, no one has a right to criticize him (or anyone else) for making such a commitment…

No matter what belief is advanced, someone can always challenge it with: ‘How do you now?’, ‘Give me a reason’, or ‘Prove it!’ When such challenges are accepted by citing further reasons which entail those under challenge, these may be questioned in turn. And so on forever. If the burden of proof or rational justification is perpetually shifted to a higher-order premise or reason, the contention originally questioned is never effectively defended… An infinite regress is created.

To justify the original contention, one would eventually have to stop at something not open to question for which one does not and need not provide justificatory reasons. These would be the halting points for rational discussion… However, if all men do not cease their questioning at the same point - if ultimate standards are perceived not to be certain or if different people deem conflicting ‘ultimate’ standards to be certain - then ‘ultimate relativism’ results. Some way of arbitrating rationally among competing ultimate stopping points by appeal to a common standard is now excluded in principle. If these ultimate statements are matters of contention, then there will be no Archimedes’ lever with which to decide among competing sets of ultimate standards. Indeed, even if everyone did subjectively happen to stop at the same place or accept the same standard, there still would be no way to prove rationally that this universal subjective standard led to objectively true statements about the world…

Obviously, one cannot, without arguing in a circle, justify the rationality of a standard of rationality by appealing to that standard… The limits of rational argument within any particular way of life seem, then, to be defined by reference to that object or belief in respect to which commitment is made or imposed, in respect to which argument is brought to a close. Thus reason is relativized to one’s halting place or standards, and cannot arbitrate among different standards. Different halting places - i.e., standards, criteria, presuppositions, conventions, dogmas, articles of faith - are taken by different individuals and define irreconcilable communities. Whatever may explain how such differences arise, reason can never dissipate them.

– W.W. Bartley, III, The Retreat to Comitment, pg. 72-74.

The QOTD, on postmodernism:

“Postmodernists nearly all reject classical foundationalism; in this they concur with most Christian thinkers and most contemporary philosophers. Momentously enough, however, many postmodernists apparently believe that the demise of classical foundationalism implies something far more startling: that there is no such thing as truth at all, no way things really are. Why make that leap, when as a matter of logic it clearly doesn’t follow? For various reasons, no doubt. Prominent among those reasons is a sort of Promethean desire not to live in a world we have not ourselves constituted or structured. With the early Heidegger, a postmodern may refuse to feel at home in any world he hasn’t himself created. Now some of this may be a bit hard to take seriously (it may seem less Promethean defiance than foolish posturing); so here is another possible reason. As I pointed out (above, p. 73), classical foundationalism arose out of uncertainty, conflict, and clamorous (and rancorous) disagreement; it emerged at a time when everyone did what was right (epistemically speaking) in his own eyes. Now life without sure and secure foundations is frightening and unnerving; hence Descartes’s fateful effort to find a sure and solid footing for the beliefs with which he found himself. (Hence also Kant’s similar effort to find an irrefragable foundation for science.)

Such Christian thinkers as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Kuyper, however, recognize that there aren’t any certain foundations of the sort Descartes sought—or, if there are, they are exceedingly slim, and there is no way to transfer their certainty to our important non-foundational beliefs about material objects, the past, other persons, and the like. This is a stance that requires a certain epistemic hardihood: there is, indeed, such a thing as truth; the stakes are, indeed, very high (it matters greatly whether you believe the truth); but there is no way to be sure that you have the truth; there is no sure and certain method of attaining truth by starting from beliefs about which you can’t be mistaken and moving infallibly to the rest of your beliefs. Furthermore, many others reject what seems to you to be most important. This is life under uncertainty, life under epistemic risk and fallibility. I believe a thousand things, and many of them are things others—others of great acuity and seriousness—do not believe. Indeed, many of the beliefs that mean the most to me are of that sort. I realize I can be seriously, dreadfully, fatally wrong, and wrong about what it is enormously important to be right. That is simply the human condition: my response must be finally, ‘Here I stand; this is the way the world looks to me.’

There is, however, another sort of reaction possible here. If it is painful to live at risk, under the gun, with uncertainty but high stakes, maybe the thing to do is just reduce or reject the stakes. If, for example, there just isn’t any such thing as truth, then clearly one can’t go wrong by believing what is false or failing to believe what is true. If we reject the very idea of truth, we needn’t feel anxious about whether we’ve got it. So the thing to do is dispense with the search for truth and retreat into projects of some other sort: self-creation and self-redefinition as with Nietzsche and Heidegger, or Rortian irony, mockery, as with Derrida. So taken, postmodernism is a kind of failure of epistemic nerve.”

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 436-37.

• Here’s a classic, but depressing, study that compared the effectiveness of Weight Watchers with self-help efforts at dieting. 150 participants (71%) in the Weight Watchers group finished the study, as did 159 (75%) participants in the self-help group. After two years, the self-help group lost an average of 1/2 of a pound each, while the Weight Watchers group lost an average of about 6 pounds each. (And remember, these were people who were so desperate to lose weight that they signed up for a clinical weight loss trial). This is usually considered a significant success for Weight Watchers because almost nobody can do any better.

• A lack of sleep increases not only your risk of obesity, but also diabetes: “Research shows the risk of getting type 2 diabetes goes up if you get less than seven hours per night. The chances rise significantly if you sleep for five hours or less. This is because poor sleep alters the way the body metabolizes the blood sugar glucose. People with type 2 diabetes have difficulty turning the glocuse into energy, due problems with insulin.”

• Meet the average American family: they don’t have a retirement account, they have $3,800.00 in the bank, and they have no mutual funds, stocks or bonds. 25% of them have no savings at all.

The QOTD, on mind vs. matter:

Fat people who lose large amounts of weight may look like someone who was never fat, but they are very different. In fact, by every measurement they seemed like people who were starving…

On every count, the weird, bizarre, almost depraved behavior that Ancel Keys reported when he studied young men who were deliberately starved in his experiment during World War II was just like what Hirsch observed among the formerly obese subjects at Rockefeller University Hospital. Something ws driving these people to regain their weight, and it was not a deep-seated desire to be fat.

Their metabolisms, for example, had changed so that they hung onto, clung to, every calorie that was consumed, making it harder for them to stay thin. Before the study began, the fat people had a normal metabolism–the number of calories burned per square inch of body surface was the same as for people who had never been fat. That changed substantially after they lost weight, with fat people burning 24% fewer calories per square meter of surace area than were used by people who were naturally thin…

Eventually more than fifty people went through the months-long process of living in the hospital and losing weight, and every one of them had the physical and psychiatric symptoms of starvation, Hirsch reports. There were a very few who did not get fat again, but they made staying thin their life’s work, becoming Weight Watchers lecturers, for example, and always counting calories and maintaining themselves in a permanent state of semi-starvation.

Did those who stayed thin simply have more willpower? In a funny way, they did, Hirsch says. ‘The strange thing is that it really does have to do with willpower in the sense that extremely powerful and very disciplined minds can force the body to accept and maintain a weight-losing or even low-weight-maintaining diet. But there is a biochemical or basic biological element in what it is that we call willpower,’ Hirsch says. ‘And the dichotomization of mind versus matter is not a very helpful way to attempt an understanding of obesity.”

- Gina Kolata, Rethinking Thin, pg. 6.

The QOTD, on the long-term nature of weight loss efforts:

“[T]he battle for weight control is never won, even after you lose weight. [According to the National Academy of Sciences:] ‘An obese individual faces a continuous lifelong struggle with no expectation that the struggle required will diminish with time. For most people, even a brief abatement in effort will be met with a significant setback in control.’”

- Gina Kolata, Rethinking Thin, pg. 6.

Well, it looks like I was right about Lost six years ago:

“Mark my words: the creators of Lost have no idea where their story is going. There is no hidden meaning to the clues they’re dropping. There’s no ‘there’ there. Lost fans, learn from the past: give up on your show now, before you waste four years watching continuity and characterization slowly circle the drain.”

Everyone who loves TV has to learn how to sense the long con. My generation of geeks learned this lesson with the X-Files. The current generation learned it with BSG. And now, maybe, the general population has learned it with Lost.

The QOTD, on biased authority:

“Medical journals are rarely accused of ideological bias, they are accused of financial bias. The press are rarely accused of financial bias, they are accused of ideological bias. If you studiously spend one month looking for the opposite bias in both, what will happen is that you will become an alcoholic.”

- The Last Psychiatrist.

• Sleep improves learning and mental performance.

• Sleep deprivation causes you to consume more calories.

• Men with untreated obstructive sleep apnea have less brain grey matter.

• “Exercise is not real great at causing weight loss. But every study has shown that if you want to keep the weight off you have to exercise. “

• Which is why I need a heart rate monitor.

• According to Dr. George Blackburn of Harvard Medical School, if you are more than 100 pounds overweight, “this is beyond our ability to make these lifestyle changes to lose enough weight to get healthy.” In other words, you’re out of luck unless you get gastric bypass surgery.

• If you buy music online, be sure to buy it from Amazon to avoid dirty mp3 files.

• Here are the incredibly depressing results of one of the longest and most robust weight loss studies I’ve seen to date. After two long years (with various groups trying low-carb diets, low-fat diets, and everything in between): “Among the 80% of participants who completed the trial, the average weight loss was 4 kg; 14 to 15% of the participants had a reduction of at least 10% of their initial body weight.”

• Why food is getting sweeter.

• The science of obesity and processed foods, from a former FDA commissioner: “The latest science seemed to suggest being overweight was my destiny. I was fat because my body’s ‘thermostat’ was set high. If I lost weight, my body would try to get it back, slowing down my metabolism till I returned to my predetermined set point… ‘Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more.’ I had read this in scientific literature, and heard it in conversations with neuroscientists and psychologists. But here was a leading food designer, a Henry Ford of mass-produced food, revealing how his industry operates. To protect his business, he did not want to be identified, but he was remarkably candid, explaining how the food industry creates dishes to hit what he called the ‘three points of the compass’. Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain’s reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behaviour and makes us want to eat more.”

• Meditation may help relieve the uniquely modern types of stress that evolution arguably did not prepare us to deal with.

• How to train to do one hundred pushups.

• Why DRM doesn’t work.

• How to always get free shipping on Amazon.

• How to make use of different types of people in a company. I aspire to be smart/lazy.

• On facebook and other social media.

• Neuroscientists at Cambridge University have shown that running stimulates the brain to grow fresh grey matter and improves mental ability.

• Willpower can be developed, like a muscle. (It can also be exhausted like a muscle, but that’s a topic for another post).

• The top two changes you can make in your life to feel happier.

• Good health, without supplements.

• Diets with lower cognitive complexity are more likely to be sustainable. It’s about more than just willpower.

• Good, simple rules for eating and living better (even if they do oversimplify and confuse correlation with causation in places).

• How to sleep better and lose weight as a result.

Quoted for truth: Moff’s law.

Of all the varieties of irritating comment out there, the absolute most annoying has to be “Why can’t you just watch the movie for what it is??? Why can’t you just enjoy it? Why do you have to analyze it???”

If you have posted such a comment, or if you are about to post such a comment, here or anywhere else, let me just advise you: Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Shut your goddamn fucking mouth. SHUT. UP.

First of all, when we analyze art, when we look for deeper meaning in it, we are enjoying it for what it is. Because that is one of the things about art, be it highbrow, lowbrow, mainstream, or avant-garde: Some sort of thought went into its making — even if the thought was, “I’m going to do this as thoughtlessly as possible”! — and as a result, some sort of thought can be gotten from its reception. That is why, among other things, artists (including, for instance, James Cameron) really like to talk about their work.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to think about a work of art. I don’t know anyone who thinks every work they encounter ought to only be enjoyed through conscious, active analysis — or if I do, they’re pretty annoying themselves. And I know many people who prefer not to think about much of what they consume, and with them I have no argument. I also have no argument with people who disagree with another person’s thoughts about a work of art. That should go without saying. Finally, this should also go without saying, but since it apparently doesn’t: Believe me, the person who is annoying you so much by thinking about the art? They have already considered your revolutionary “just enjoy it” strategy, because it is not actually revolutionary at all. It is the default state for most of humanity.

So when you go out of your way to suggest that people should be thinking less — that not using one’s capacity for reason is an admirable position to take, and one that should be actively advocated — you are not saying anything particularly intelligent. And unless you live on a parallel version of Earth where too many people are thinking too deeply and critically about the world around them and what’s going on in their own heads, you’re not helping anything; on the contrary, you’re acting as an advocate for entropy.

And most annoyingly of all, you’re contributing to the fucking conversation yourselves when you make your stupid, stupid comments. You are basically saying, “I think people shouldn’t think so much and share their thoughts, that’s my thought that I have to share.” If you really think people should just enjoy the movie without thinking about it, then why the fuck did you (1) click on the post in the first place, and (2) bother to leave a comment? If it bugs you so much, GO WATCH A GODDAMN FUNNY CAT VIDEO.

Via Mimi Smartypants.

The QOTD, echoing Quine, on the impossibility of bare empiricist epistemology:

Indeed, there is a connection between belief and perception of beauty (and similar qualities) that goes much deeper than Weinberg suggests. As Leibniz and many since have noted, there are ordinarily many different theories or beliefs compatible with our evidence. If we plot our data on Cartesian coordinates, we will be able to draw as many lines as we please through the points we plot, and we could project any of the appropriately related hypotheses. All emeralds so far examined have been green; if so, however, they have also all been grue, where an emerald is grue if either it is examined before 2050 a.d. (bringing Goodman up to date) and is found to be green, or is not so examined and is blue. [390] So (instead of projecting that all emeralds are green) we could project that all emeralds are grue, thus concluding that emeralds not observed before 2050 are blue. The sun has come up every morning so far; we form the belief that it comes up every day and will also come up tomorrow. We could have formed quite a different belief, however: where T is today, we could have formed the belief that the sun comes up every day prior to T and never after T. Why do we accept the hypotheses we do; why do we project green rather than grue, and the hypothesis that the sun will continue to come up rather than the one according to which it won’t? Why do we project simple hypotheses rather than complex ones? Not because we have evidence that simpler hypotheses are more likely to be correct than complex ones; for, for any alleged evidence for this conclusion, there will be a more complex inference from the same data for the denial of this conclusion. So why do we do it?

Because we find simple beliefs (whatever precisely simplicity is) more natural and more attractive than complex beliefs. Only a madman would project grue or its partner in crime, bleen. [391] Messy, complex beliefs are ugly, disgusting, weird, repellent: we dislike them and therefore reject them. We may hope that the world is in fact such that simplicity (at least simplicity of a certain sort and in certain areas) is a mark of truth; but we have no hope whatever of establishing that in a way that doesn’t already rely upon simplicity. For suppose we note that in the last one thousand cases the simplest hypothesis has turned out to be true. Where t is the present, say that a belief is simplex’ if it is formed before t and simple, or after t and complex; what we will have observed, so far, is that simplex beliefs tend to be true. But that means that from now on we should go for complex beliefs.

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 309-10.

The QOTD, on Christian apologetics:

Still (comes the reply), can’t we discover for ourselves, without any special divine aid or assistance, that the Bible (the New Testament, say) is in fact ‘from God’; divinely inspired in such a way that God speaks to us in it and through it, and hence wholly reliable? Can’t we come to see this in the same way that we can learn that Herodotus and Xenophon are reasonably reliable reporters of what they hear and see? And once we see that, couldn’t we then infer that the Bible’s central message of incarnation and atonement is true? Can’t we see and appreciate the historical case for the truth of the main lines of Christian belief without any special work of the Holy Spirit? ‘You must be born again’ all right - your affections, aims, and intentions must be re calibrated, redirected, reversed - and that requires special divine help. But given that recalibration, couldn’t you then see and appreciate the historical case for the truth of the main lines of Christianity without any special work of the Holy Spirit?

I don’t think so. Even discounting the effects of sin on our apprehension of the historical case, that case isn’t strong enough to produce warranted belief that the main lines of Christian teaching are true - at most, it could produce the warranted belief that the main lines of Christian teaching aren’t particularly improbable.”

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 244-45.

The QOTD, on the epistemology of faith:

“Compare belief of this sort [i.e., faith] with the a priori and memory beliefs I spoke of above. In a certain sense, there isn’t anything to go on in any of the three cases. You don’t accept memory and obvious a priori beliefs on the basis of other beliefs; but you also lack the detailed phenomenological basis, the rich and highly articulated sensuous imagery that is involved in perception. What you do have in all three cases is another kind of phenomenal evidence, what I have been calling doxastic evidence… There is a certain kind of phenomenology that distinguishes entertaining a proposition you believe from one you do not: the former simply seems right, correct, natural, approved - the experience isn’t easy to describe. You have this doxastic evidence in all three sorts of cases (as, indeed, in any case of belief), and you have nothing else to go on. But you don’t need anything else to go on…”

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 264.