Please recommend some audiobooks

6 Delta 10 October 2014 01:34PM

Hi All,

I've got into audiobooks lately and have been enjoying listening to David Fitzgerald's Nailed! and his Heretics Guide to mormonism, along with Greta Christina's "Why Are You Atheists So Angry?" and Laura Bates's "Everyday Sexism" which were all very good. I was wondering what other illuminating and engaging books might be recommended, ideally ones available as audiobooks on audible.

I've already read The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion and God Is Not Great in book form as well, so it might be time for something not specifically religion-related, unless it has some interesting new angle.

After Nailed and Everyday Sexism were really illuminating I'm now thinking there must be lots of other must-read books out there and wondered what people here might recommend. Any suggestions would be appreciated.


Thanks for your time.

Hangman as analogy for Natural Selection

0 Delta 05 October 2012 12:02PM

Hi guys,

I was trying to come up with a helpful analogy to help explain natural selection in simple terms and it occurred to me that the game Hangman might make a useful analogy, albeit an imperfect and simplified one. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this and any other useful analogies or strategies for explaining in simple terms how natural selection allows complexity to arise from simplicity and how it is distinct from random chance.

The Hangman analogy I propose would read as follows:

A long word is chosen, say with a dozen letters, and a dozen blanks are drawn on the paper. Person A then guesses a letter. If the letter is present in the word a blank is filled in and the player can try another letter and so on. Their further guesses will be informed by the letters they have already discovered rather than being completely random. If the letter is not present the player loses a life (represented by the drawing of part of the gallows). If they run out of lives the game is over and a new player, Person B takes their place. Person B must start from the beginning.

In this analogy the long word is a complex adaption, requiring many seperate chance mutations to build it. Each guessed letter is a chance mutation that can be beneficial (correct answers bring you closer) or detrimental (wrong ones cost you lives). The loss of all lives represents the extinction of the species, meaning no further mutations can occur. Person B is an entirely different species that can't "compare notes" with Person A and hence must start from the beginning (though they may take a different route).

The benefit of this analogy is it's an example of random guesses still having a sense of forward progression (discovered letters are not removed, and gradually build up), and that it refers to a simple game I think most people will be familiar with. You could then go on to explain how a complex adaption takes many more than a dozen steps, that there are many more than 24 possible mutations, and that each guess takes many generations, to give a sense of the timescales involved.

The weaknesses are considerable and include the inability to go backwards (beneficial changes can be lost as well as gained) and the existence of a single specific end goal (the unknown word), rather than this being a continual process without set targets. It also ignores the possibility that a beneficial mutation does not spread throughout the species.

I very much doubt this is an original suggestion, but it seemed a handy simplification of the "password-guessing" analogy I was just reading about in Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker". Any comments or alternative methods would be welcome (I'm still not very widely read on the subject of evolution so I'm sure others have put it more clearly than I could).

Thanks for your time.


David

Becoming a gene machine - what should change?

0 Delta 01 August 2012 01:06PM

Hello everyone,

After being introduced to the fascinating subject of evolutionary theory by Less Wrong and starting reading The Selfish Gene I have been slowly coming to terms with the mind-blowing revelation that I am simply a machine built to ensure the preservation of my genes, and that they are the only part of me that will outlive me. This is a change of huge magnitude, requiring I abandon the usual cached thoughts and perceptions of humanity as somehow special, detached from and above the world and baser matter that built us.

Such a revelation should make me question all my assumptions, permeate my thinking, yet I find myself still thinking much the same ways I did before. I have not fully integrated this information and its implications into my world-view. I have noticed myself changing my mind less often than I think, and hope.

My question to you is therefore, how would you expect a person who had learnt of their status as a "mere" gene machine then reflected and fully integrated the knowledge to think? What new thoughts and habits would they form compared to their old life as an immortal special creature, allegedly made in god's image? What would you expect to change?

I offer the following suggestions of the kinds of change this hypothetical person, let us call them "the subject", would make:

- The subject would have to reformulate their attitude to other non-human life-forms or potential lifeforms. With no divine spark seperating us from other animals or artificial minds, they would experience the freedom to decide what they place in their "tribe" (I'm reminded of Human the piggy in Speaker for the Dead realising he can include other cultures and even alien species in his definition of his "tribe"). Would they show more empathy towards non-sapient animals too? How else would this manifest?

- The subject would become more aware of their own mortality and that of others. This would hopefully result in taking additional care of themselves and others on the basis that each has only one chance to be happy and our indifferent creators will not do so. Regrettably this could go the other way and result in undervaluing life given its brevity and seeing no need for morality.

- The subject would feel additional kinship towards fellow humans, bearing in mind that their fundamental structure is almost exactly the same. They would hopefully have greater difficulty labelling others as inhuman or evil and be better capable of empathy. This coupled with their own mortality might incline them to pursue longer-term projects for the benefit of humanity as a whole.

- Less laudably the subject might make their new awareness a source of pride instead of humility, and take pleasure in looking down up those who still hold such "backward" beliefs, seeing them as weak for embracing reassuring falsehoods and having inflated senses of their uniqueness and special-ness.

 

These are all very general, and I would be very interested to hear your ideas of specific behaviours such a conversion would engender if properly reflected upon and integrated. Thank you for your time.