Why I choose not to take Pascal's wager

From a letter to the editor in the Toronto Star:

How many people even think about Pascal's wager, which says that if we try to follow a faith that believes in God (and His commandments) and find out when we die that we were correct in that faith, we will have found salvation. And if we were wrong, we lost out on a bit of "fun."

But if we do not believe in God, and if we do whatever we like or whatever feels good, and in the final judgment find out that we were wrong, where will we be?

The reason I, personally, do not try to follow a faith that believes in a god is that for me, there is no god. I spent years under the impression that to be a good person one had to be thoroughly and devoutly religious, but my attempts to be religious were all fruitless. When I prayed, there was nothing there. It wasn't just that my prayers weren't answered, it wasn't even that whatever was supposed to be listening to my prayers was pretending not to listen it was more like talking to a brick wall or a disconnected phone. There was nothing there. I felt like a great dirty hypocrite every time I prayed or set foot in a church, because I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I would just be going through the motions and keeping up appearances, living a lie, which is surely a sin.

If I did choose to live by Pascal's wager and follow a faith, I would simply be living a lie. I would be nothing more than a liar and a hypocrite who just keeps up appearances in order to impress people. If it turned out that fait was correct, I would still be going to hell on judgement day because any deity worth the title of deity would be able to tell that I'd been living my life as a hypocrite, and surely wouldn't be too impressed that I'd thought I could fool an omniscient deity with a bit of genuflecting and a couple of Hail Marys.

However, I have instead chosen to put the energy that I used to use to fake piety into doing whatever I feel like, whatever feels good. What I feel like and what feels good is simply being the best possible version of myself I can be, the kind of person I've always wanted to be. The best possible outcome of this course of action is that I help a few people, make a few people happy, and leave the world a slightly better place. The worst possible outcome is that I won't have hurt anyone. So then if judgement day does come I might still end up going to hell as an atheist, but there's a slight chance that judgement transcends religion and I might go to heaven as a good person. In any case, I'm no worse off being true to myself and not putting large quantities of energy into living a lie.

I find it rather terrifying that there are people for whom "doing whatever they feel like, whatever feels good" is automatically equated with doing something bad or harmful, and the only thing stopping them from doing this is their belief in something that, despite half a lifetime of searching, simply does not exist for me.

The necessary everyday tasks of life

I can't sleep, despite the fact that it's raining, so I am going to document this.

Quite a lot of angst and strife in my childhood boils down to the fact that for my parents, eating is purely a chore. Something to get out of the way so they can get on with their day. For me it is more important than that - eating exactly the food I want is a source of joy, and being denied the opportunity to eat exactly the food I want is downright depressing. Upon further reflection, I realized that various everyday activities have different levels of importance for different people. So I'm going to write down how I feel about various everyday tasks - pleasurable? a hardship? neutral? - until I get tired and decide to go to sleep.

Eating: highly pleasurable when I can eat exactly what I feel like eating. This doesn't necessarily mean gourmet food, just what my body and my palate want. Not having access to the foods I crave over significant periods of time is very depressing. Being hungry makes me grumpy like a toddler - unfortunately it took me until about the age of 20 to realize this - and can also make me nauseous, which is rather counterproductive.

Drinking (water etc.): always pleasurable. I have a very low thirst tolerance, so a drink of cold water is always refreshing. Slight negative associations with being told to "stay hydrated", but really I'll stay hydrated by myself if left to my own devices with a drinking vessel and a source of cold water.

Going to the bathroom: always a positive experience. I use this time as a perfectly valid excuse for a mental break from whatever I'm doing, and the act of eliminating itself can be quite enjoyable when it is badly needed. This becomes a negative experience when suitable facilities are not available, but that has nothing to do with going to the bathroom itself and everything to do with icky crawly things.

Showering: a pleasurable experience, very relaxing, an excellent place to get thinking done. Negative only when unsuitable facilities are available - see above.

Brushing my teeth: neutral in most cases, a chore when I'm in a hurry or uncomfortable or exhausted

Hair removal: I think it averages out to neutral. The look and feel of having unwanted hair freshly removed is positive, but the actual maintenance work is quite the chore and I have no particular enjoyment of the process. This is such a precarious balance that I put more of a cost-benefit analysis into any decision to change my hair removal routine than most people put into taking out a loan.

Hair care: fraught with issues, but averages out to neutral.

Nail care: pleasurable by association. I've made a ritual of having a glass of wine and reading fanfic or gaming while doing my nails, so it's a perfectly valid one-hour vacation from my everyday duties.

Skin care: neutral, with small bursts of pleasure during particularly effective acne removal

Makeup: as a normal everyday activity, makeup is neutral, but if for whatever reason I don't have access to or am not permitted to apply makeup in a situation where I feel the need to do so, this becomes disproprotionately negative.

Selecting clothing: generally neutral, sometimes positive if I feel particularly pleased with what I get to wear, very occasionally negative if I feel completely displeased with what I have to wear

Shopping: neutral to negative. It's always a chore, but it can be a harmless chore if approached properly.

Laundry: quite the chore, but I have made it slightly positive by excusing myself from several other duties while I'm doing laundry

Dishes: one of my least favourite chores. I make it bearable by doing it in TV commercial breaks or while talking on the phone.

Exercising: a chore, completely negative. Not at all enjoyable. Strong negative associations. If I were permitted to be excused from one everyday real-life responsibility, it would be dealing with icky crawling things; if I were permitted to be excused from two everyday real-life responsibilities, it would be dealing with icky crawling things, and exercising. The only positive moments happen when my joints crack while I'm stretching them in yoga, but that's not at all worth the trouble.

Money management: neutral, but not something I like to discuss because it makes people cocky and smug.

Personal health care: mostly neutral, although phoning up to make appointments is somewhat of a chore just because I don't like making non-social phone calls in general.

Taking out garbage and recycling: very much a chore. I hate doing this.

Keeping up on current events: staying as informed as I, personally, want to be for my own personal needs is quite easy and pleasurable. Staying as informed as I should so that I'm qualified to participate knowledgeably in adult conversations is a bit of a chore, because I have to read articles that I'd normally just skim over. As a whole, this task tends towards pleasurable because I tend to stop when I'm no longer interested.

Commuting: in general I hate it, but I have arranged my life so that it isn't too time consuming and I can read on the way, which makes it lean very very slightly towards pleasurable.

Working: neutral overall. The fact that I have a job that's such a good fit for me is quite positive, but the fact that I have to be in the office and working at given times instead of sleeping or gaming is rather negative.

And, because I'm tired now...

Sleeping: The act of sleeping itself is always pleasurable, especially when I'm permitted all the REM sleep I need and a nice slow wake-up. But lying in bed waiting for sleep to overtake me can be slightly negative.

Cystic acne as survival mechanism

For those of you are fortunate enough never to have experienced cystic acne, basically it's like a normal garden-variety zit, but bigger, denser and deeper. In my experience the zit itself is generally about the size of a chickpea (plus any residual inflammation), and down so deep in the skin that it won't necessarily come to head at all. When they occur in places like earlobes or nostrils, I can't initially tell what side they're going to come out on. They're generally big enough to cause a temporary visible deformity, and painful enough that there's an omnipresent nagging pain - the pain isn't debilitating or anything, but I am always aware of it, at all times.

When I have cystic acne I can still do and focus on the activities of everyday living. Despite the pain, I can still eat, sleep, translate, read, write, study, run errands, keep house, and do anything that needs doing. However, when my mind starts wandering beyond my immediate activities, and I start thinking about big, distant, long-term concerns like the security of my pension or the long-term effects of having what is basically an employment equity system for selecting the governor general or whether if I'm caught in a subway bombing I should run away from the explosion so I have a chance of escaping or run towards the explosion so I die as quickly as possible, when I start thinking about these sort of things, my cystic acne distracts me. I don't get very far into worrying about big, distant things before my mind wanders to just how painful that zit on my ear is and how cool it would be if it popped all in one piece and how I could maybe get it to pop if I approached it from a different angle or maybe I should put a hot compress on it and then try to pop it or maybe I should just try to dry it out. Maslow's hierarchy kicks in, and any attempts to worry about Big Issues get distracted by thinking about my own pain.

I think this is a survival mechanism. I always get cystic acne when I'm stressed. Before I learned the word "cystic" I called it "stress acne". I think my body produces these deep, painful zits on purpose so that I will be physically incapable of worrying about anything non-immediate. That way I can deal only with the immediate during stressful times so I don't make myself sick worrying about things that I can't do anything about at the moment. Then when my stress level lowers, the cystic acne goes away and I can worry about Big Issues as much as I want.

Creekside Estate Cabernet

This is rather the quintessential red. It's very dark, in colour and in flavour, but it's everything a red wine should be. And you've got to love a winery that is confident enough to put "fabulous with cheeseburgers!" on their label blurb!

Opinions please

I ordered a particular dictionary second-hand from a store located in Ppoland. I did this because it's by my favourite foreign-language dictionary publisher, but Polish-English dictionaries by this publisher are not available in Canada or through Amazon. The book was advertised as being like new.

I paid relatively little for this dictionary - the shipping cost more than the book itself, and the total price was less than I earn in an hour. By Canadian standards this is very cheap for a dictionary; I don't know what dictionary prices are like in Poland.

Yesterday, I noticed that there was an error in the binding of this book. Some pages were duplicated in the wrong place, and other pages were missing. I'm missing a total of about 50 pages of information in a 950 page book. Other than the missing pages, the book is in excellent condition. The only sign that it is used is someone's name and student number written in pencil inside the front cover.

If the store is unable to exchange my copy for a properly-bound dictionary, I still want to keep it because I can't get this dictionary anywhere else and the vast majority of the book is quite helpful.

Now for the question: It occurs to me that under normal circumstances and by Canadian standards, a refund of part of the purchase price would be in order. I have no idea what Polish standards would be. However, only about 5% of the book is damaged. A 5%-of-the-purchase-price refund would be literally pocket change, an amount of money a child wouldn't be impressed with, not worth the trouble of processing a credit card refund. A refund of the entire purchase price (not including the shipping costs, which I don't want refunded because they did go through the trouble of shipping it to Canada.

So, your opinions please: if they can't exchange the book for me, should I ask for a partial refund? If so, how much? Or should I just be happy that I got 95% of an excellent dictionary that is not available in Canada for such a reasonable price?

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer

I don't think the title is quite accurate. Rather than how soccer explains globalization, this book is more about how globalization explains soccer culture around the world. I'm not a huge soccer fan - I can certainly enjoy World Cup, but if I never saw another soccer match I wouldn't care - but I still enjoyed this book because it offered me that most elusive quarry, insight into people's motiviations for incomprehensible acts. A lot of the book deals with hooliganism, and the author explains it in a way that not only makes me understand why someone would choose to be a hooligan, but also gives insight to the motiviation of the more macro violence of which hooliganism is a microcosm. This is another one for the "Read this to feel smart" list.

The monkey and the plywood violin

Leonard Cohen's First We Take Manhattan just popped into my head, as it often does, like much of the music my parents listened to on the family stereo and in the car in my youth. As I habitually do when I'm alone and a song occurs to me, I started to sing it out.

This song feels much much different when I'm walking through every day with the assumption that the subway is going to get bombed.

Thoughts for today

1. I am very relaxed today. Also, I am wearing pants today for the first time in ages. I wonder if this is a coincidence, or if I'm just generally more relaxed when I don't have to worry about how I arrange my legs. Don't get me wrong, I love wearing skirts, but sometimes it is nice to be able to crack my hips without first looking around to make sure no one will see, or sit in lotus position on my desk chair when I need a change of pace.

2. I think in translation school they shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the use of illustrations in terminology. I often find it's much easier to understand a concept if I can see a picture of it, and then once I fully understand it I can find the most effective wording at my leisure. I also think someone should design a terminology database program that allows the user to upload graphics.

3. Dear Edda from 9 Chickweed Lane,

You know full well that that Burkhardt is a total cad. For that reason alone, he doesn't deserve your services as an accompanist. He deserves to be stranded without an accompanist! If you really miss playing the piano, you can play it by yourself for yourself, or offer your services to other dance classes, or even accompany Amos. Remember Amos? The adorable geeky cellist whom you said you'd love forever? Perhaps making music together would be a good way to work off some of that unresolved sexual tension...

4. Most workplaces have policies and measures in place to protect employees from sexual harassment by co-workers and superiors. I think there also need to be policies to protect people from sexual harassment by customers.

5. The problem with babies is sometimes they feel the need to joyously shriek "AAAAH BAA BAA BAAAA!!!!" in the middle of a place that is usually quiet, and there's not much their parents can do about it.

Penascal Rosé

This wine tasted like the top and the bottom, but not the middle, of shiraz or cabernet sauvignon. It had some nice creamy undertones, almost like a chardonnay, but on top was a sort of tangy zingy raspberry-like taste. It's quite refreshing in the same way lemon-flavoured water with a touch too much lemon flavour is. It reminds me of a dessert containing raspberries that I like despite the fact that it contains raspberries.

Question for U of T people

If an outrageously small number of people enroll in a given class, like only five people or something, will U of T cancel the class? Or if it's in ROSI right now is it safe to assume that it's all go?

Blackfly Season by Gilles Blunt

This is a perfectly decent mystery. It's one of those mysteries where you find out "whodunnit" before the detective did, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It can get a bit gory in places, and the forensic scenes include descriptions of maggots, but it didn't really bother me.

I was terribly confused about the presence of some of the subplots involving the main detective's personal life, which didn't get resolved or contribute to the solving of the mystery, but it turns out that this book is part of a series - I discovered that just now when googling to confirm the spelling of the author's name.

The real influence media has on kids' body image

I rarely agree with Margaret Wente, who is one of those people with the disarming habit of stating even the most sensible of points in a way that makes me viscerally want to argue with her, but today I think she has a point.

I think the media is a major cause of body image issues in young people, but not by showing pictures of uber-skinny models etc. like conventional wisdom dictates. I think it contributes more by constantly printing panicky articles about how SO MANY PEOPLE ARE TOO FAT AND WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE OF FAT! Kids read newspapers and watch TV even before they enter puberty - I think I started reading the newspaper beyond the comics section around the age of 8, and kids are generally more media-savvy today - and the omnipresence of articles about the so-called obesity epidemic are bound to raise concerns in young readers about whether they are doing enough to keep a healthy weight.

I don't know how the media saturation of obesity concerns now compares with my childhood - it could have been the same in my childhood, it could have been less, people who remember the 1980s from an adult perspective are welcome to weigh in on this - but I had picked up enough from the ether to know by the age of 9 that one should have an eye on one's weight, one should be making an effort to ensure that one eats right and gets enough exercise. I had the notion that this was more of a concern for adult bodies, but I was worried then, at the age of 9, by the fact that I didn't know how to go about systematically creating a diet and exercise plan to ensure that I didn't get fat when I was a grownup. (I needn't have worried - I learned the basics of designing a fitness regimine in middle school health class, and I hadn't anticipated the internet.) I also remember around that age reading about why specifically salt was bad for you, and deciding to stop adding salt to my food (a vow that lasted until puberty kicked in, a phenomenon which, in addition to the usual changes, planted some kind of monster in my taste receptors that sometimes screams out "GRRRRRRROOWWL!!! GIVE ME SALT!!!!"). I also remember thinking that perhaps I was getting overweight because my belly sticks out. While my belly does stick out even more when I'm heavy, I think it will always stick out, because physical examination suggests that even if there were no fat and no muscle, my internal organs alone would be making it stick out. But I digress.

My point is that young readers are likely to come away from articles about obesity feelings like they ought to be taking action to make sure that they don't become obese, and I think this is an overlooked way that the media is contributing to negative body image.

Estrogen vs. Testosterone

The BBC has this fascinating test to determine what sex your brain is. My overall score ended up being exactly the average score for all women, but on the individual sub-tests I scored either excessively feminine or excessively masculine.

One of the sub-tests showed me two slightly different pictures of the same man, and I had to pick which one I found more attractive. (There is also the option to be shown pictures of women, but you had to pick gender or the other so I picked men.) When I got my results for this sub-test, it explained that one of each set of photos had been altered to make the man in the picture either appear more masculine (i.e. having physical features that suggest a higher testosterone level) or more feminine (i.e. having physical features that suggest a lower testosterone level). It turned out that in every case, I picked the picture that suggested a lower testosterone level.

According to the information on the BBC website, women tend to be attracted to more masculine features while ovulating. This would explain my reaction; I have been taking chemical measures to prevent ovulation for years, and, unless someone went terribly wrong without my noticing, I have not ovulated once during my entire adult life.

This all got me thinking. In general, I consciously tend to find physical features that suggest high levels of testosterone unattractive. I also tend to find behaviour, attitudes, etc. that suggest high levels of testosterone unattractive. And by "unattractive" in this paragraph, I don't mean just sexually unattractive, but generally unpleasant and something to be avoided if at all possible. Would I find it more attractive (or at least less unattractive) if I were ovulating? Who knows? I'm certainly not going to risk ovulating to find out!

Then it occurred to me that they should do a study on this. I don't know where they'd get enough willing volunteers, but if they could they'd need to find women who would be willing to spend several months with a normal, fertile menstrual cycle, and several months without ovulating at all by taking estrogen every day. Then they should test their reactions to high-testosterone images or situations during every week of their fertile cycles, and during every week of their infertile cycles. Obviously, if the information provided by the BBC is corret, we'd expect the attractiveness of testosterone to peak at ovulation. But how would the attractiveness of testosterone compare at an infertile time in an unregulated cycle, and during an estrogen-regulated cycle?

But then there's also the fact that birth control pills (which are essentially estrogen) work by making the body think that it has already ovulated. I don't actually know whether this gives your brain the same hormonal level as peak fertility or the same hormonal level as low fertility. Peak fertility might make sense because if you've already ovulated and haven't menstruated yet, you've got an egg floating around in there, so the part of your brain that's driven by a primal reproductive urge would want you to seek out providers of sperm, which, according to the BBC, your brain manifests as high-testosterone men. But low fertility would also make sense, because the purpose of birth control is to make you infertile. So if it's low fertility, that would explain my dislike of testosterone. If it's peak fertility, I guess that means I'm just not into testosterone, and perhaps my brain is hard-wired not to breed, which would be convenient.

Further research is required.

Dear J.K. Rowling, I have a plan for you

In an interview, JKR said that no one else at all knows how HP is going to end.

I think this is too big of a risk. What if something happens to her? Therefore, I propse the following contingency plan. JKR should:

1. Write down everything she knows has to happen
2. Encrypt or encode it
3. Take the coded summary, and put it in a safe deposit box in a high-security vault in the safest bank in the world.
4. Put the code/encryption key in a sfe deposit box in a high-security vault in the second-safest bank in the world.
5. Get four next-most trustworthy lawyers in the world, and divide among them the names of the two banks and the two safe deposit box numbers, with instructions that they are to disclose this information to the single most trustworthy lawyer in the world if and only if a) JKR has been killed or incapacitated, and b) they are expressly instructed to do so by said lawyer.
6. Get the single-most trustworthy lawyer in the world to execute the entire thing as part of JKR's will, and distribute the information to the public.

The silly things I worry about

It was mentioned in an interview that JK Rowling expects the next Harry Potter book to take about two years.

In my real-life job, one of the things I'm doing is helping to prepare material for a conference that will take place in about two years. Nothing is certain yet, but it has been mentioned that I may be required to attend the conference.

So the first thing that popped into my head with the two-year timeline was "OMG, what if I'm off at a conference when this comes out?"

A challenge for those with musical training

Try singing the words do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, in that order, to a melody that is not an ascending major scale. Bonus points for choosing a melody that is not a song either. Try a descending major scale, or a minor scale, or broken/melodic triad and inversion. It's HARD! Maybe it's easier for other people, but I keep straying from the melody and back into the ascending major scale.

Polskie Ogórki

Bick's Polskie Ogórki have changed their serving size on the nutritional information panel from 3/4 of a pickle (which was just a stupid serving size) to 2 pickles. The strange thing is I don't think the amounts of each nutrient have changed, although I don't have an old jar to compare. Apparently there are only 3 calories in 2 pickles, which makes the idea of a 3/4 pickles serving size even stranger.

After HBP (spoiler-free)

After I finished HBP, I was wandering around in kind of a stunned trance. I went to the fan sites, posted my thoughts, read other people's thoughts, and went to bed. HP characters wandered around in my dreams (which involved the Order of the Phoenix playing Magical Ultimate Frisbee against Death Eaters on the campus of McMaster University), woke up, had a shower, developed further thoughts on HP, and went online again to deal with those. All in all, I was completely immersed in the Potterverse for about 27 straight hours.

Then I went out to buy groceries. There were people walking around in shorts carrying shopping bags, people sitting on patios, people buying salad dressing and toilet paper and coffee filters, and an adorable German Shepherd puppy that did that puppy thing where they jump up with their front paws on your legs.

It was very strange to see real life going on as usual after everything that just happened in the Potterverse.

HARRY POTTER SPOILER WARNING!

This is a post-dated post. If the date and time indicated for this post have not yet passed, there may be new material below. New: I am continually bumping this post up whenever I have Potter-related thoughts that I want to post. I was planning to keep my theorizing to SQ for the time being, but SQ seems to have exploded.

Warning: all posts below this and above the July 15th post entitled "End of Harry Potter spoilers" contain spoilers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

If you wish to avoid Harry Potter spoilers, use the search function in your browser to skip direct to July 15th. If your browser is not finding July 15th, you may need to go to the July 2005 archive to display all posts made in July.

As I read through the book, I am going to be posting my impressions chapter by chapter. This is not a full summary or a proper review, but I am not going to be censoring myself when it comes to spoilers. You have been warned!

Update: I have now finished the book. All spoilers are below this post

WARNING: HEAVY SPOILERS, INCLUDING THINGS THAT WERE NOT ANTICIPATED IN RUMOURS OR FAN THEORIES!!!!