abstraction | The Short Version

The Price of Ignorance

March 5, 2008 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

Originally posted on 08-09-07: An acquaintance or relative, I forget which, gave their old car to a teenaged daughter, who drove it till the engine blew up a few weeks later. Somehow she had never encountered the fact that … [Read more...]

When I realized that the idea of god was a joke, I thought that was the end of the story. Later I found that Christianity had shaped my values, and while some were worth keeping, many had lost their foundation—the meaning of life, for example. Something similar happened when I realized that the idea of free will was a joke, and I’ve spent the decades since both those realizations discovering and editing what Julia Galef calls the “orphan beliefs” they left behind. It’s a tricky business, and this blog has been a chronicle of my efforts to puzzle it all out, including reviews of related books. I hope you find it helpful.