Did you know that there is such thing as a World Rock Paper Scissors Society which does hold regular tournaments and country championships and even a world championship (where the world champion will be awarded 10,000 $)?
Maybe this way of decision making is strongly underrated.
A few years ago, I was discussing the tensions between relativism and religion with a friend. In a vastly simplified nutshell, relativism is an understanding of the world which is founded on the principle that everything we know and perceive is relative to our own person (e.g. we perceive the whole world through our senses, which are known to be fallible) and that there can therefore be no such thing as absolute truth. Think of the artificial reality of The Matrix as an extreme example. (The tension between relativism and religion is a topic I continue to be interested in, but it’s so complex that I’ve come to think that understanding it is more or less a lifetime project. I’ve certainly not even scratched the surface, let alone made up my mind.)
In that context I was told that I had to read a certain article by Sir Hermann Bondi (Physicist, 1919–2005) entitled “Arrogance of certainty”, because it apparently forms the basis of every discussion of the topic. I was given a copy of the article on paper, and I liked it because of its lucid and clear writing style. I kept it, even though the paper got quite crumpled in my bag at some point.
Recently I was looking for the article again and searched for it on Google. To my great surprise, I couldn’t find any trace of it, let alone the whole text. Therefore I want to re-publish it here so that others may find it online in future. Unfortunately I have no idea where and when it was originally published — all I have is a crumpled photocopy of a photocopy of a newspaper cutting. If you have any further information, please let me know.
I neither fully agree or disagree with this article, but I think it is well worth reading. Without any further comment, here it is.
Hermann Bondi
Arrogance of certainty
I am a non-believer in any revealed religion and a scientist. In my acquaintance with scientists I find both belief and non-belief. I know sufficient numbers of scientists of each persuasion to be willing to classify two statements as both being stupid and palpably untrue prejudices, viz, that a person, being a scientist must accordingly be a believer in a revealed religion, or the opposite statement.
Any thinking person must be struck with awe and wonder on contemplating the mystery and complexity of our universe. We scientists have somewhat enlarged our modest island of understanding that is surrounded by a huge ocean of ignorance. Some feel that there must be an intelligence, an architect of all this grandeur, an architect that may be called God, but without ascribing to this unknown entity any interest in our human affairs or in our prayers. (If I rightly understand, this was Einstein’s view.)
There are also people who believe, as a generalized feeling, that this entity, this God, in some undefined way responds to their trouble and their prayers without claiming that they have any describable or communicable knowledge of this their God. Again, there is revealed religion, the belief that God in some way, different for different religions, revealed himself in some precise communicable manner conveying some absolute truth.
I have no quarrel with the first three stages, but I regard the widespread human tendency to have firm faith in a revealed religion as one of our most negative traits. Indeed, I do not call myself an atheist, but an anti-revelationist. To call myself an atheist would mean denying an entity so differently defined by different people that the denial is meaningless. Some say God is love. I would certainly not wish to deny love. Some say God is nature. I am not so absurd as to deny nature. But the certainty involved in revelation horrifies me, and the historical record of the deeds done in the name of such revelations bears me out.
If one looks at religiosity, the immediate staggering fact is that different people believe firmly and fervently in different and, in many respects, contradictory religions. The very variety of faiths is remarkable, yet each can claim adherents of the highest integrity, sincerity and honesty, utterly convinced of their belief. How anyone can have the arrogance to think that their own belief is right and anybody who thinks differently is wrong passes my comprehension. Surely the overwhelming evidence is that the human mind has the tendency to believe firmly but incorrectly, since at most one of the many competing revealed religions can be right.
Nor am I much impressed by what some regard as threads common to different major religions as regards their theory. What has a non-theistic faith like Buddhism in common with a theistic one like Islam? Why are we to stress likenesses now when people have fought to the death over minute differences in their religions?
There is indeed a common morality among all of us humans, enshrined in the golden rule that one should do to others only as one would have done to oneself. I see this founded in our common humanity, which is why I call myself a Humanist. I see this common morality sometimes supported by religion, sometimes perverted by it. Above all we need to strengthen all that unites us with other humans, where religion so readily divides us. This division by faiths, so often pursued with the utmost cruelty, is what surely we should strive to heal, by relegating religion from the public domain to that of individual belief or non-belief.
What I abhor about revealed religion is its supposed absolute certainty. It is here that I see the real conflict between science and religion. In science we know that our understanding, our theories are only provisional, and liable to be upset by experiment and observation. On this basis, so well described by Karl Popper, science has indeed acquired universality with people of different cultures, ideologies, races etc able to cooperate. Science is so successful in this because it is attuned to the basic human characteristic of fallibility. It is the inhuman certainty a believer feels in revelation that is so obnoxious and harmful and unacceptable as a basis for morality.
Of course we must recognize the great role religion has played in history but need not support it. Being an anti-revelationist is in no way arid. It allows one to enjoy freely all that human genius has produced; it allows one to engage untrammelled in the search that is the real joy of living.
Sir Hermann Bondi, FRS, was Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Seen this morning: PENNY, a german supermarket chain, sells typewriters.
A warm welcome to Johannes Hauser, who is joining me as a co-author of this blog. Johannes has contributed two posts and a number of comments so far, with a particular focus on the interaction between technology and everyday life. I hope that Johannes will give a bit of a balance to our content — if I head off on a technology tangent, he brings things back down to earth. I have worked with Johannes before and appreciate his well-founded and clearly articulated opinions. We are looking forward to reading more from him on Yes/No/Cancel over the coming weeks and months.
Usually I try to keep postings on this blog within my normal topic boundaries (usability, mobile and business/entrepreneurship) in an attempt to avoid the rambling and inconsequential nonsense which is seen on so many web sites. Please excuse me if I depart from this rule on this one occasion, to write a few (highly subjective, slightly opinionated and not very well qualified) comments about this time of year instead.
Christmas. A fairly bizarre cultural phenomenon in modern times. We have almost developed a kind of love/hate relationship with it: it seems that most of the world celebrates it in some form, although its meaning and background has become thoroughly warped. Everybody seems to have strong opinions about it, many of which are somehow contradictory. People look forward to it, but at the same time can hardly bear it any more. Snowy landscapes and fat men in woolly coats (Santa Claus and variations) are standard Christmas imagery even in countries where the temperature never drops below 15ºC. People accuse each other of cultural imperialism and then just celebrate anyway.
A Christian festival, versus other religions
Sometime in the past, it was quite simple: Various European peoples had a festival sometime around the winter solstice in pre-Christian times (a natural time of year for a celebration), then in Christianity it got associated with the birth of Jesus. Still it was considered to be vastly less important than Easter, and even the Epiphany is still more important than Christmas day in many parts of the world today. Makes sense that the most important thing about Jesus is that he died and rose again (Easter), second most important is that the news about him was spread throughout the world (Epiphany) and third most important is that he was born in human form (Christmas).
Gradually over the 19th and 20th centuries Christmas in western cultures gained economic significance, as merchants realised that selling presents was a great way to make lots of money. Nothing fundamentally wrong with making money, except that those people who wanted to stick to the religious orientation of the festival had to make a bit more effort to retain the spiritual dimension in spite of an environment which favoured the economic dimension. People criticised that Christmas shopping stress and a desire for a spiritual experience of Advent didn’t go together very well, but if you wanted to combine them you could still get by quite well.
Then within the last 10 years or so, there was an increased move towards a secularisation of Chrismas, sparking off the so-called Christmas controversy. The US retail industry was presumably thinking along these lines: “If we advertise Christmas presents, we can sell presents to Christians (plus a few cultural hangers-on). But if we advertise culture-neutrally and secularly, we can sell them to everybody.” There were also secularisation moves by public authorities, who feared that putting up Christmas trees (but not a nine-branched candelabrum or oil lamps, for instance) would be seen as religiously and culturally patronising to non-Christians.
In principle, paying attention to the cultural sensitivities of others is a very good thing. However, there’s also a massive risk of losing one’s own cultural identity, accumulated over centuries, in the process of excessive political correctness. When you start referring to Christmas as “Primary Giving Season” or replace Christmas wishes with nonsensical babble such as “Share the Magic of the Season” or “Pass the Cheer“, I am sad and feel that something precious has been lost.
Personally, I am delighted if somebody wishes me a happy Hanukkah or Diwali or Chinese New Year or Kwanzaa or whatever. I must admit that I don’t have much of an idea what the significance of most of these festivals is, but that doesn’t spoil the fact that somebody would like to share something with me which is special to them, and I consider it to be an honour that I may share a bit of their culture despite being pretty clueless about it. And it gives me an opportunity to learn more about that particular culture or religion, to begin to understand it better and to embrace its way of life.
Similarly I don’t feel particularly bad about wishing a happy Christmas to atheists, Jews, Muslims etc. — I just hope that they will understand my good intentions and translate it into something appropriate in their own culture. My deeper reasoning behind this is that even if I were to try to be culture-neutral, I would probably not succeed anyway. For instance, I may be wishing “Happy Holidays” to somebody for whom December is a month of mourning. Or my invitation to share the magic of the season may go to somebody who hates Christmas and doesn’t find it magical in the least. If somebody wants to be offended, they are going to be offended, no matter how neutral you try to be. So in the interest of sanity, I’ll rather be culture-specific in the first place (and apologise afterwards if somebody does take offence for some reason).
Christmas symbols
Shops and consumer brands all over the world seem to have agreed on an almost universal imagery of Christmas (or rather the “holiday season”, since many of the symbols are secularised). Visiting Hong Kong in December a few years ago, I found quite astonishing how these European/North American style decorations had been adopted with virtually no modification for local customs. Probably it’s mainly the shops which have developed these visual clues to highlight the fact that they sell products which may possibly be suitable as presents.
Symbols invariably involve snow (pictures of snowy landscapes, snowmen, fake snow, snowflake shapes), fat bearded men of some sort (Father Christmas, Santa Claus, …), reindeer, sleighs and bells, stars and fir trees. While some of these may have religious origins (stars spring to mind as a biblical motif), Santa Claus was consciously designed for advertising in modern times. Hardly anybody thinks about these symbols today, taking them for granted.
Not many of these symbols are appealing to me, but they must match other people’s tastes, otherwise we wouldn’t get so much of them. The curious thing is just that, unlike language (which, as discussed above, does not lend itself well to culture-neutral treatment), visual symbols seem to actually transcend cultural boundaries very successfully. Maybe that’s because imagery is less specific, and everybody can associate something with it. It does not matter if snowflakes are used as decoration by people who have never seen real snow in their life; it does not matter that the “cute” pastic reindeer bear very little resemblance to what real reindeer look like. The important thing is only the signalling effect, telling shoppers that it is time to buy presents.
Snow is not exactly a common feature in the Holy Land, where Jesus was born, so it does make you wonder where this imagery originates from. I don’t know for sure, but I would not be surprised if quite a few of the motifs originally come from Germany. Just before Christmas I visited the Christkindlesmarkt in Nürnberg — there in the biting cold, clutching Glühwein in my hands, the darkness scattered with thousands of lights, golden decorations glittering amongst branches of fir trees, angel figures singing their silent praises through the frosty but delighted crowds — there, in this Christmas market, a lot of the well-known Christmas images seemed to be appropriate.
I’m not saying that it’s wrong to borrow these symbols from that ancient Christmas market and put them in a well-heated, brightly illuminated shopping centre. There’s nothing holy about them, so if people like them, they should use them. I only hesitate because I fear that commercialised imagery might trample over older, more traditional symbols and suffocate them. For example, my mother goes to some effort every year to find chocolate figures of St. Nikolaus, traditionally given on 6 December. You’d be forgiven for mistaking the figure for Father Christmas/Santa Claus, but St. Nikolaus is shown with the insignia of a bishop (mitre and crosier), and the tradition of St. Nicolas’ day is much older than Father Christmas. But because so few people can actually tell the difference, more and more chocolate figures (such as the one from Lindt) are now actually Santas and not Nicolases. The lovely old tradition is in danger of being bulldozed by more modern imagery.
I wonder if a shop which does not participate in the whole Christmas decoration mania will perform any worse in its sales. Somehow I find it hard to believe that white plastic shavings (vaguely resembling snow), tacky plastic Christmas trees etc. actually encourage customers to spend money. On me they have more the opposite effect of making me want to run in the opposite direction, but I may of course represent a small minority.
Chrismas music
Finally a brief rant if you will allow. If there is one thing I really hate about Christmas, it is cheesy Christmas music. I don’t even know which I hate more: the soppy, sickeningly sweet arrangements of already bad traditional songs and carols, or modern pop groups’ attempts at making a Christmas hit single. I honestly find it very hard to imagine how anybody can bear this stuff, let alone enjoy it. Think about the poor shop assistants who have to bear with endless repetitions of the same awful syrup for weeks and weeks on end. If I hear bloody Christmas music in a shop, it instantly puts me in a bad mood and makes me want to get out as soon as possible (or sabotage the sound system, or burn down the factory where these CDs are produced). It certainly does NOT put me in a relaxed mood in which I will open my wallet wide. Please, please just stop playing this crap, and the world will be a better place.
There is some good Christmas music too, as demonstrated by the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, for example. If you really have to play something Christmassy, play something proper; even better just keep silence, there’s enough sound pollution already.
Anyway, Christmas is over for this year. Somehow I doubt though that my comments here will be outdated next year.
Right, well I must admit that this blog had moved down quite a lot in my list of priorities. Then yesterday Robster wrote a very kind post which has resulted in this site getting more hits in 2 days than it had had in its entire lifetime before. Thank you very much, and I think the ball is back in my court now to write something vaguely worth reading!
Just a quick update of where we are now — things have moved forward a bit, and I’m having an exciting time with my company, Ept Computing. We initially set out to do general usability consultancy, and since then we have discovered that there is one particular area where usability is a particularly pressing issue — mobile phones.
Mobiles are pretty powerful computers these days, and increasingly powerful applications are being developed for them. 3G networks are becoming pretty commonplace (in the UK anyway), and the mobile internet is finally within reach of the mainstream. In some Asian countries, internet access from mobile devices already vastly exceeds fixed-line internet use.
But the user experience on mobiles is, in many cases, still terrifying. I still find installing an application on my phone a very puzzling process, despite having Bluetooth, E-mail, WiFi and you-name-it set up. Accessing websites is perfectly doable, both with Opera Mobile and Nokia’s WebKit browser, which render desktop sites remarkably well — but that doesn’t get past the fundamental problem: either the text is too small to read, or you have to scroll horizontally, or you use some form of adaptation such as Opera’s small screen rendering (which, frankly, was the first thing I switched off after installing the application). Nothing particularly satisfying. And that’s what we’re setting out to change.
Anyway, back to the topic of reviving this blog. I have decided to scrap the German version of this site entirely — too much effort to write everything twice, and most Germans speak pretty good English anyway — and will be putting a few touches to the design so that it doesn’t look quite so generic. Then tomorrow I hope to serve you the photos of train ticket machines which I promised so long ago. Yes, we’re back on air.