Game of Thrones and the United States of America

I started watching Game of Thrones recently. While it is a medieval fantasy world, I cannot avoid thinking that many practices depicted in the series have strong elements of truth from the actual medieval times on this planet.

Most interesting to me is the vast separation of the social classes. Kings are kings, queens are queens, royalty is royalty, and the everyday people (villagers) remain everyday people. There are strict barriers between them and rarely if ever does someone cross to another social group.

I cannot possibly imagine how people of the middle ages must have felt, knowing that never in their entire lifetime would they be able to advance socially. The royal families, which dominated virtually all of the European countries, maintained their status using the very convenient rule that their status is derived by a blood relationship, and not by merit.

Travelling today in the palaces of France, England, Austria, etc., I try to get a sense of how the villagers of the time would look upon them, knowing that they can never get inside. Neither them nor their children, or their children's children. There must have been people that loved their kings, but there must have been people that hated them.

And then the discovery of the Americas happened, and its conquest makes way more sense to me under this prism now. Because the poor villager without any hope of improving his life now is presented with an opportunity to go to a new land where there are no kings, queens, or royalty. He finally has a chance to be judged on merit. And so the first people that migrated to America must have been the people that mostly hated the status of the European royalty.

This is all more evident in the constitution of the United States, which starts with the words "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States". Not to a king, but to a Congress. In fact, the term "President of the United States" was chosen as the simplest, most humble title they could find, as far away as possible from royal terms. The president is someone that simply presides a board, without implying any direct executive powers. (The fact that it became a very powerful title is a result of later developments.)

I have much higher appreciation for the founding fathers of the US now. They looked at Europe and designed a ruling system as different as possible. No kings, no royalty, with distributed power among different bodies, elected from the people. 

It's quite amazing if you think about it. We tend to forget its importance because today we never really feel totally unable to progress in life. We are not meritocratic enough yet, but there is a general sense that if you struggle in life you will be rewarded. Which is why our world is so much better than the middle ages.

Science is not a democracy

In my last post I argued that believing in an anthropomorphic God is not a choice, where the two options are of equal value. This is because there is no reliable evidence yet on the presence of an earthly supernatural being.

Robin Ince recently wrote along similar lines:

There is a gaggle that seems to consider that expertise is an unfair advantage, that all opinions are equal; an idea that people who are experts in climate change, drugs or engineering are given unfair preference just because they spend much of their life studying these things. I do not think it is fascism that heart surgeons seem to have the monopoly of placing hands in a chest cavity and fiddling with an aorta.
We should not trust people just because they are experts, but if we are not prepared to put the time and effort in to understand something, [...] then we are placed in a position where we must defer and try and make the best decision we can as to who we should defer to.

Science is not a democracy; it's an evidence-based meritocracy. It's closer to fascism than a democracy, with the major difference that the expert/fascist earns his status through the scientific method, and not because of circumstances or strength (physical, political, or otherwise).

In science we do not vote or make decisions based on popular choice. There is no choice. At some points in time most people believed that the earth was in the center of the solar system, that matter cannot cross walls, that the universe was eternal and static. But it didn't matter. What matters is what's right and what's wrong.

Apology to theists

I am an atheist.

I used to think that believing in God or not was a choice. I admired people that didn't, and didn't care about people that did.

Not anymore. I have come to think that believing in God should have a definite answer, in the same way that whether the earth is flat has a definite answer. Sure, you can choose to believe that the earth is flat, but that's wrong. It's not a choice.

No one is born an atheist. We have no reason not to believe in God, and atheism is a state that needs effort to be reached.

I, and millions other people, have reached that state through education, scientific reasoning, logical deductions, and by just plainly looking at the data. It boils down to a lack of evidence for the existence of a God.

(God, in this piece, is the supernatural anthropomorphic know-it-all old man sitting in the sky and watching us all. There are other forms of God which can be fine.)

Now here's the thing: In today's world, I don't think this is a choice anymore. Any person who is educated, can reason scientifically and deduct logically, should reach that same conclusion. There is no excuse anymore in our hyper-connected western world with ultra-fast communication systems and access to all of human knowledge. 

So when I see someone that believes in God, I see a person that hasn't gone through the the process of education, scientific reasoning and logical deducting. I have a problem with them. I can never admire such a person fully, because it signifies lack of coherent thinking. My perfect person has to be an atheist.

I don't have a problem with religion per se. Many aspects of religious teachings are great. But when the supernatural part comes in, and I am asked to believe something without any proof, then I cannot stand it. It's not a matter of choice, it's just wrong. I think of such people in the same way I think of people who believe in astrology, homeopathy, or faster-than-light-travel: they are unaware of the truth and thus choose to believe in something false.

It's exactly the feeling I have towards kids that believe in Santa.

Ted at the Oscars

fxguide.com on how a digital Ted presented the sound Oscars last night:

With five nominees in each category, 10 different outcomes were rendered (Tippett relied on Dell Precision workstations) in a four week schedule. The correct ones were played on the night. Interestingly, in the Sound Editing category Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty tied, which presumably meant that the segment ended earlier than intended and cut back to a live Wahlberg – without anyone at home knowing.

It was the church, stupid

I always wondered why modern astronomy didn't flourish in the sunny, warm climates of the Mediterranean during the renaissance and beyond.

The birth of modern astronomy was dominated by Northern Europeans: Copernicus was Polish, Brahe was Danish, Kepler, Herschel and Bessel were Germans. (Galileo in Italy is the only major exception). In addition, the prime meridian was established in Greenwich, England from all places. All these countries are notorious for the bad weather and the cloudy skies. How come it was them and not their sunnier southern counterparts?

One might argue it was because they were more advanced societies. That might explain the lack of innovation coming from Greece or Turkey, but not from Italy which was leading the renaissance at the time.

Another argument might be that only superpowers with trading activity over sea had motivation to push astronomy forward in order to ensure their dominance in the sea through accurate journeys. That might explain the case for England, but doesn't explain the German dominance, or why Portugal and Spain never developed great astronomers.

And then it dawned on me: it was the church!

The dominance of the catholic church in Rome, and the overwhelming spread of Christianity over the Mediterranean prevented people from innovating in the matters of the skies, as that was supposed to be an untouchable subject determined by God. Innovation did happen in \Italy and Spain but it focused in other, more earthly subject like engineering and mathematics. But for explaining the skies, introducing the heliocentric system, observing the motions of the stars, the church dogma didn't leave much room for thought. Just look at what happened to Galileo, the only one who dared to go against the church.

And that's how the playing field became empty for the Northern Europeans.