> Educate the parents instead to spend more right time with their children.
This is kind of assuming that the parents have full control over the lives of their children. Which:
a. Isn't true
b. Shouldn't be true (because some parents are bad)
As a parent you go to work for 8+ hours per day. During that time your child is in the care of "society" (school / daycare / whatever). And during that time the only thing that protects them is laws and regulations.
> This is the same argument for casinos but states don’t run those.
In most (or at least a lot of) countries states regulate casinos _so much_ than it becomes almost a technicality that casinos are privately owned.
Also with lotteries you have the scale factor -- in order to have an attractive lottery, you need a ton of ticket buyers, so if you have a national level lottery you can definitely make neighborhood lotteries way less appealing.
Blackjack and poker tables don't scale the same way.
The units the article is concerned with is time spent, not output.
Spend more time creating than you do consuming.
The only one of your options examples that doesn’t then make more sense is the software developer, and as a software developer myself, I’m very content with not putting my creativity against those other examples.
Being against easy consumption is less a direct 1:1 comparison of creation time to passive time and more trying not to fall into a rut of watching "progress porn" of other creatives.
Good creators are always assessing and perpetually 20% dissatisfied with their output so experiencing how others have honed their craft and made great stuff should serve to make you more dissatisfied with your own progress on your own projects. But if you are 100% dissatisfied and 0% productive then you've lost balance and are in a writer's block.
I think you're looking at "consumption" that is directly related to something productive. When one reads code, it goes towards writing (and all other examples you showed); that is essentially productive
However, what if I spend more time on Instagram and Twitter (consuming that won't lead to creating) over writing code. What if I spend more hours watching cat videos on Youtube over actually learning or making something?
Consumption in this context are what I'd call "empty calorie" consumption
> What if I spend more hours watching cat videos on Youtube over actually learning or making something?
That doesn't sound that bad in itself. In my experience falling into this trap many, many times over my life, it's something that's rather easy to recognize as harmful—just difficult to climb out of if it's an established habit.
So—consumption of unproductive content per se strikes me as less of a problem than a) addictive consumption and b) the illusion that consumption can replace a sense of self.
This. As long as platforms optimise for engagement e.g. to get more add revenue, it seems unfair to blame folks who enjoy cat videos for watching too many of them and not doing something more creative/productive. I wish there was a better/easier option to be able to watch just enough cat videos that one needs, in between "time disappears in a black hole of habit forming retention features" and "never touch that platform again".
(As an atheist who found The God Delusion to be one of the most important books I've ever read, as it gave me a solid framework of arguing in what I already considered to be true)
It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before.
Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.
It’s not so much about accessibility, just quality of argument. As I said, basically no one that has read and thought significantly about religion thinks that Dawkins’ works are anything other than simple-minded polemics.
It’s the equivalent of watching a 5-hour YouTube video about programming and thinking you understand computer science, except that books by Dawkins et al are not even very good, impartial introductions to the topic. All I can say is: if the topic of religion is interesting to you, these are not good books to start with.
I also really don’t think Genealogy of Morality is all that complicated.
Edit: I just remembered this excellent book by Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. I really recommend that if you’re looking for a more nuanced but modern take of what Nietzsche thought about religion.
I don't think the Bible is as popular as you make it out to be.
Its really the songs / performances that carry the Christian belief; few people actually read the bible but they can all re-iterate to you that Christ was born in a manager because there was no room in the inn (not in the Bible).
Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality might not be complicated to read. And while all this stuff about good and evil is valuable context to understand religion, all the other slave morality babble feels pretty close to a YoutTube rant video.
The challenge with books like The God Delusion is that it's barely one step above strawman arguments.
It attacks claims made by some simple lay people, based on their half-baked understanding of their own faiths (which they never really dug into). However, people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims.
The arguments being debunked are ones that religious scholars themselves would have disagreed with. Such misrepresentations don't guide anyone
Very few real world practitioners of these religions would recognize “religious scholars” or “academic experts” as being authoritative arbiters of their religious beliefs.
And atheists don't generally recognise Richard Dawkins as the arbiter of their beliefs either.
If someone were to attack the arguments for atheism in good faith I would hope they would fight its strongest arguments and not just tackle a hack like Dawkins. I'd like to extend the arguments for God the same courtesy.
My experience with religion in the public sphere is that ~all of the religious arguments that are actually advanced in that sphere have nothing to do with ones made by religious scholars.
Attacking a strawman is perfectly appropriate in this case, because the strawman is what actually drives policy.
I've always been curious about serious scholarship of religion.
I've wondered whether it is possible to be both, say, a Christian and an atheist simultaneously (e.g., not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good, or perhaps interpreting the Bible completely metaphorically).
I imagine that scholars can have serious disagreements over the meaning of the Bible or even its provenance without necessarily leaving the religion.
The vast majority of historians, including atheist ones, think that someone answering to that general description _did_ exist, though they obviously don't think he was the son of God.
> not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good
Substitute 'God' for 'Christ', and yeah, that's common. Many people are also purely _culturally_ religious; they don't believe in a god (or at least not the one their religion mandates), and do not accept many of the teachings or beliefs of their religion, but do _identify_ as being a member of a religion. In Ireland, say, 70% of people identified as Catholic on the most recent census (in the 90s this was closer to 90%; younger people _are_ less likely to engage in this practice and the child abuse scandals also caused many older people to break away), but in polling the majority of Irish Catholics do not believe in, well, Catholic stuff (a personal god, hell, transubstantiation, the virgin birth, etc), or accept the Church's moral worldview (see outcomes of referendums on abortion, equal marriage etc).
I'm an atheist but wouldn't mind seeing a religion based on Jesus' teachings flourish. I think most people are dumb and need something/someone to encourage them to act rationally and civilly. Not me, of course; I try my best and don't need further encouragement. Current Christianity isn't sufficient; one can easily see how un-Jesus-like many Christians are.
> Christian and an atheist simultaneously (e.g., not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good, or perhaps interpreting the Bible completely metaphorically).
To be clear, Hart's own religious views seem pretty eclectic, and he is much less dogmatically Christian than blurbs and marketing of his books suggest.
As a Muslim, I've seen Dawkins make very basic and laughably incorrect claims about Islam. It clearly shows he has extremely shallow knowledge about what he claims to criticize. Niel DeGrasse Tyson is also guilty of the same.
Ok, I just suffered through the 13 minutes of nonsens from this "expert".
One problem is that he doesn't understand what he is arguing against. Dawkins doesn't argue that, because people tend to have similar beliefs as those around them, he has disproved those beliefs. He just uses it to illustrate the close minded way some people take the supremacy of their particular religion for granted. The question "What if you are wrong?" comes with a lot of assumptions.
It's also laughable for an expert (for a number of reasons) to claim that C.S. Lewis has disproved atheism.
And the counter argument that Dawkins himself he is an atheist because he was born in the UK in the 20th century just proves Dawkins point. I think Dawkins himself would agree that the likelihood of him being atheist would have been far lower if he would have been born in Pakistan or in 17th century England.
This was just a short clip that has English captions. He refuted Dawkins' book in a longer series on his main channel, but I don't think it has English captions. He is an expert, no need to be dismissive.
Does it matter all that much that they get some nuances to Islam, or other religions, incorrect when the central tenant is that there is no God / spiritual being? Like arguing over the cake decorations instead of tackling the central issue of the sponge being made of chocolate or turds.
It's not just nuances, it's entire straw man fallacies. They don't understand basic Islamic tenants and claims, let alone advanced topics like Kalam, and then they attempt to argue against it, making a mockery out of themselves.
Details do matter, because they lump all religions together and attempt to argue against them as a whole, not realizing that there exist core differences among them, even if there is potentially large overlap between say Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Disregarding these facts is doing an injustice to themselves and to their audience, and spreads ignorance and malice.
While I agree that it's bad to spread misinformation that may be harmful, I'll again appeal to you that it doesn't matter a great deal to the audience of this particular book. If the argument is that the fundamental underpinning of all these religions is untrue, unreasonable, or directionally opposite to modern science then the details are not important.
To put it another way, if you read the book and you are religious then it probably matters to you in a way that other's just don't give a damn about. For example, I remember at uni some Christians in my class debating the holy spirit / God / Jesus and the distinction or lack thereof. But if you're not Christian then it doesn't matter, that detail has no bearing on you at all. In the same way that if you are Christian then a book discussing whether Jesus was a mythical figure and retelling of an older story or a real person, that detail is just outside your belief system, it doesn't have any bearing on you and there's no point engaging with that detail.
> If the argument is that the fundamental underpinning of all these religions is untrue, unreasonable, or directionally opposite to modern science then the details are not important.
And that argument is fundamentally flawed, and is the point I'm trying to make. While it may apply to other religions, it does not apply to Islam. This is where Dawkins and his ilk show their ignorance and fall flat, and falsifies their entire approach. What appears to them as (or them falsely assuming to be) underpinnings, isn't, if I can put it in another way.
I don't see the parallel to the example you gave. Once you're inside a religion, then you can discuss its details and nuances like the examples you gave. That's a completely orthogonal discussion however. Dawkins and the neo-atheist movement are arguing core basics like the existence of God, then using some fallacies that some religions commit to discredit every religion. See the problem there?
Sorry you've kind of lost me. Islam has a god and heaven as a fundamental part doesn't it? The argument is not that there's no Christian God, it's that there are no gods of any kind and the preposition of humanity to make up mythological religions for various reasons. All religions fall into this argument.
Just because Islam has God and Paradise as a fundamental aspect does not mean that you can conflate its presentation of God with the rest of the religions, which is my point. His argument is extremely brittle and laughable.
We know that truth extends beyond what can be empirically proven. Meaning that just because something cannot be proven empirically, does not mean that it is not true. Furthermore, truth is not limited to what can only be empirically proven. This is what the neo-atheists/scientism followers seem to always fall for, and something that even philisophers know not to be true. I believe Godel's incompleteness theorem has something to say about the matter as well. And Dr. Ameri is an expert, you can read up about his credentials. Unlike say Dawkins who was referred to as a journalist by an academic in his field.
Personally -- I couldn't get past the first 2 chapters of the book. The notations it introduces are pretty unfamiliar for a newcomer and it quickly becomes really hard to follow. I genuinely would like to hear from somebody who managed to go through the entire book above, and what their main takeaways were (from the chapters that follow the two introductory ones).
The non-technical introduction chapter is pretty easy to follow, and I would recommend reading it.
I was asking myself the same question. The conclusion I came to is that the getting your mind blown phase doesn't keep you coming back again and again -- it's why games like Minecraft/League of Legends have much higher player counts than say The Last of Us, or other certified mind-blowing games.
I have a Quest 2 and a Steam Deck. Definitely my Steam Deck is getting more use, though it's initial "wow" factor was smaller.
If your threat model includes "The government is prepared to torture me to obtain my encryption keys", it should also include "The government is prepared to lie and claim they found incriminating evidence on my device, and lock me away forever."
Just make sure that your device doesn't contain information incriminating other people who the government are trying to track down. That means not using real names, or metadata that connects pseudonyms with physical identities (e.g. phone numbers).
> I think less people are interested in actually owning their housing.
How do you reconcile this impression of yours with the fact that housing prices are shooting up in all major cities, and have been so for decades? Why is this happening if fewer people are actually interested in owning their own housing?
As a sidenote: in my own personal experience housing is the single major issue of all my close friends and family, but it's only an option for a small minority of them. In fact, I have never met a single person who was in the financial position to buy a house/apartment and didn't do so.
Simple, rich people looking for stable assets. I mean sure its not as simple as that but this is generally what is happening in my city. Old space with smaller houses is bought and built on by big housing companies. More and more space in the city is owned by a few big (some stock traded) companies.
I live in Switzerland and a lot of my social circle is in tech, so i know quite some people who have the financial means to own their housing but only few do. Most in the high income spectrum even use the flexibility of moving regularly.
I personally don't consider buying a house anytime soon either. I could prolly afford the house i rent, however i dont live near a city, i highly doubt the value would ever rise, more the opposite as the house is old and needs regular repairs. Buying the house would be like 350 times the rent, at least. Plus all the repairs are suddenly my problem.
True, Trump was probably the most peaceful president since the 2. WW for the rest of the World. But he definitely stole the "greatest Fire-starter and stupidity talker" from Bush.
BTW: If he could make the thing with N. Korea, he would probably be reminded as someone like Nixon (not directly good but for sure not a abomination)
This is kind of assuming that the parents have full control over the lives of their children. Which:
a. Isn't true b. Shouldn't be true (because some parents are bad)
As a parent you go to work for 8+ hours per day. During that time your child is in the care of "society" (school / daycare / whatever). And during that time the only thing that protects them is laws and regulations.