The faith of a rationalist

In the past days I have been going through some of the texts of Bertrand Russel. Among them, I would like to suggest you his paper entitled "Why I am not a Christian and the faith of a rationalist". It outlines in a well-written way the main arguments for why religion and, in particular, Christianity are flawed and should not be taken as seriously as one does. Besides the well-known arguments against religion, such as the lack of evidence supporting god, he makes the following two points which are most interesting:

1) If you think that there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are faced with the following problem: if you think that this distinction was designed by god, then it is meaningless to say that god is good because he himself designed the rules for saying that something is good. Now, if you think that god is good, then you must admit that the rules defining right and wrong come from somewhere else. So, why do you need god?

2) Was Christ as described in the Gospels a wise man? In some aspects yes, but in many others no. There were much wiser men than Christ, for instance, Bertrand Russel himself is much wiser than Christ. Chirst for instance believed on hell. To believe on the idea that someone will be punished with the worst tortures for the rest of time just because he/she disagrees with some values does not seem to be very wise.

From my personal background, I could pose a similar question w.r.t. Krishna: was Krishna a wise man? It does not seem wise to believe that a person's duty (dharma) comes from the fact that he/she was born within a social class. In particular, Krishna tells Arjuna, the warrior prince that was in doubt to fight against his kin, that he should fight because he is a warrior, that is his duty. In that sense, Buddha seems a bit better since at least he acknowledges the problems of the caste system. Moreover, to my knowledge, Krishna did not say anything about the fact that the war would involve millions of "innocent" soldiers that served both armies.

Americans got it wrong

Dear all,

It has been a while (almost one and half years) since my last post. Much has changed in my life in the meantime. I graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, got engaged, and now I am a postdoctorate researcher at UPENN, Philadelphia, in the US, since last November.

After five years in Europe, I find the life in the US very different from the European one. The Americans have a very different set of values than the Europeans. One big difference, in my opinion, is that Americans do not know how to live. Let me give you a simple example: I often ask the graduate students at UPENN about their plans for Summer break, and all of them tell me about how they are searching for internships in companies or trying to find out some more extra classes to take. If I asked the same question to an European, most of them would tell me about their big plans of going to the beach or hiking, etc. In France, for instance, the whole country stops in August, that is, everyone is on vacations. When I tell this to any American, they tell me how impossible it would be even to think on asking his/her boss for a month leave.

Another aspect that differs very much from the European values is on environmental issues. This is specially shocking when coming from Germany which is one of the countries that best takes care of the environment. In the US it is really the opposite. There is basically no care for issues like recycling, saving energy or water, mass transportation, etc. For instance, the lights in my department stay on the whole time, even in weekends! The same happens in the building where I live. There is not even a timer that automatically turns off the lights after some time. Recycling in the US is also ridiculous. My building is one of the few that do something, but compared to any German home, it is really nothing. They only recycle old newspapers and magazines. They do not even have a slot for tin cans!

However, the worst aspect is not even the two above, but rather how they treat the poor. It is sad to see that in the richest and most powerful country in the world, there are people without teeth that cannot formulate correctly one sentence. You find people like that very often on the streets here in Philadelphia. They do not have access to hospitals, schools, basically nothing, while the upper class shows off their BMWs and big cars around. Given this situation, it is not hard to see how one can easily manipulate these fragile people with nationalistic propaganda or religious brainwashing. They are against issues which would clearly benefit them directly, such as health care. This contrasts with the situation in Europe: whenever there is any attempt to remove rights of, for example, the French people, they rise up. They are not easily manipulated because they are treated much better by the French society, although they do have their problems.

After five months in the US, I am really glad to discover that this is not where I want to be for the rest of my life, at least not if things continue like this. Europe may have its problems, e.g., xenophoby, but overall their values are much more compatible my values.

Too much of information, but not too much of wisdom!

Today I saw an interesting interview with Ralph Nader, among other things, a lawyer, a political activist, and an independent candidate in the American presidential campaign. In the interview, Nader questions that, with the outcome and development of internet, people are overwhelmed with tons of information and do not have enough time to process it into wisdom. 

Nader continues and explains what is the chain used to process senseless bits of information to a more deeper understanding of the world: 

                Information -> Knowledge -> Judgment -> Experience -> Wisdom.

First, one must know what is the information, that would be knowledge. Then with this knowledge one must think critically about it, that is, judge the knowledge, and then, base his/her actions on this judgement leading to experience. Finally, only after he/she has experimented and seen the outcomes of his/her actions, he/she transforms pieces of information into wisdom. 

Engineers vs Logicians

This past week I was attending a summer school about software verification, called VTSA, in Saarbruecken. There were many interesting lectures and I could learn much about model checkers and SAT solvers, giving me very good impression of the event.

From a more proof-theoretic and automated deduction perspective, it was interesting to see what is researched in model checking and in SAT solvers. They seem to do more engineering oriented research, trying to have good implementations and algorithms to overcome the state space explosion when modeling always more complicated softwares; while we try to work more in expressiveness of the logic and postpone, as much as possible, to implement specific algorithms that can handle some specific cases. So there is a contrasting approach in the communities: the theorem proving employes more logicians, while the model checking community employes more engineers.

However, I was very impressed on how far the engineers/model checkers/SAT solvers can go by "hacking" logic to be efficient. They seem to have many more applications cases than the automated theorem proving community, and seem to attract more and more the attention of industries. The negative aspect is that the size of software models seems to be growing much faster than the computational power of computers, what implies that more "hacks" would be necessary to obtain efficient implementations, and with these "hacks" more mysterious these systems would be. Moreover, the properties that we would like to be proved also tend to be more expressive, and hence may not be possible to check them by using model checkers at all. Therefore, I believe that in the future there will be an increasing demand for theorem provers, and to meet this demand, we must research more logic. This does not mean, however, that model checkers will not be used any longer. I believe that for simple properties, model checkers will continue to be used in larger scale, as proving with model checkers is in general easier than with theorem provers.

Modern Person?

Recently, Andrea brought to my attention a very curious way of Indians classifying a person as a modern person, what is not at all common in the western world. For an Indian, modern people are those that do not wear traditional Indian clothes, and that are more flexible towards traditions, such as dating or flerting, enjoying the nightlife, and other more "western" habits. As Indian society has not yet freed itself from religious/traditional habits, specially those traditions related to relationships before marriage and women suffrage, this classification is normal in India, but long forgotten in western cultures, where these movements happened one or two generations ago. That was indeed a very curious observation of cultural differences affecting language.

Working Holidays? Why work?

In the past three weeks, I was traveling through Australia, passing from Sydney, Alice Springs, in the center, and Cairns, to the east coast. As I was traveling alone, I prefered to stay in hostels, where is easier to meet people and enjoy more my stay. I met people from several nationalities, Germans, lots of them, French, Dutch, etc. What surprised me the most is that they are not ordinary backpackers, as those that we see in Europe and travel around for maybe 1-2 months. They were the so called Holiday-Workers, people that obtain a special visa and that are allowed to work, usually in blue collar jobs, and stay in Australia for longer periods, visiting the country. Though the idea seems interesting, I still did not understand why is this a good option, compared to the alternative of working in Europe and only then coming to Australia for a shorter period.

Each time I met one of these working-holiday students, I would ask why they do not just come for a short period, only for vacations. I obtained different answers: some would say that they come for the culture experience, what is not very convincing, since the Australian culture is not that different from the European and, moreover, with the jobs they do and the places they stay, they meet more Europeans than Australians; others said that they came here to save money for passing their universities later. What is also not very satisfying, since the living cost in Australia, specially the hostel rates, are very high, and I really doubt that the get some money out of this trip, when considering that they have to pay an expensive flight ticket.

I think the real reason for them to come here in hoards is a more basic one: independence. These holiday-workers are students that just finished their high school and are eager for "freedom" from their parents. They are constantly partying and getting wasted. What brings me to my point. Why work in Australia? Isn't it better to work in Europe and make short holidays there itself?

Achieving Perfection

This week, me and Andrea were at Barcelona, visiting the town for a week and what impressed me the most was the Casa Batllo, a house designed by the famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. In my trips through Europe and elsewhere, I've seen several beautiful momuments and buildings, but this house had something more, it was not only beautiful, but also practical. All ornaments had not only its place in the house's sea world theme, but also its function in mainting either the rooms and halls illuminated, ventilated or something else.

This is exactly what research is all about: finding beautiful symmetries in theories that are also useful in, say, computer science. A theory that is only beautiful lacks the same as a theory that is useful but ugly. Gaudi, indeed, achieved perfection in his research field.