Living the good life elegantly

One of the ideas Nassim Nicholas Taleb comes back to again and again, both in The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness is that you can and should live elegantly.

Living elegantly means being stoical about loss and disaster, and not working too hard or becoming overly stressed when things don’t go your way.

It also means avoiding “noise.” In this context noise is the constant humdrum flow of news and factoids that we all expose ourselves to in this information-saturated age. Reading the paper every morning doesn’t make you any more informed than someone who spends their time reading philosophy and history textbooks.

Taleb argues that the older something is the more likely it is to be of value: things that aren’t valuable tend not to be preserved or sustained in culture. This leads to an interesting comment on religion: whyever people believe in god is beside the point, millions of people do and have believed in God for thousands of years so there must be some psychological or cultural value to it. I’m inclined to agree with this, but not with the general point that “because we’ve always done it” is a good argument in favour of anything.

My objection is to the imposition of religious cultural values on those who do not believe: particularly the recent complaint to the ASA that the atheist bus is "offensive."

Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, sez:

"There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

"But there is scant evidence on the other side, so I think the advertisers are really going to struggle to show their claim is not an exaggeration or inaccurate, as the ASA code puts it."

Taleb would of course point out that you can't prove a negative ("God does not exist") and I would point out that the atheist bus does not claim to: "There is probably no God."

This statement is induced partly from lack of any indication of the existence of God so far (based on repeatable experiment, rather than subjective experience) and deduced from the internal inconsistency of most conceptions of God.

In The Black Swan Taleb presents a strong finding from cognitive psychology called the information bias that shows that being exposed to information more frequently does not necessarily improve your ability to make decisions.

Taleb also argues that being presented with a constant barrage of negative news is also bad for you from the point of view of happiness.

I’d like to draw a link between what Taleb says and the ideas of the Viridian design philosophy. In Bruce Sterling’s last note he says that people should minimise the amount of badly-designed clutter in their lives so that they might be happier. In the same way Taleb is advocating a reduction in information clutter, and concentrating on quality rather than quantity of data.

Atheist bus

I blogged about Ariane Sherine's suggestion for an atheist bus advert back in June and it seems the plan has come close to fruition:

The Atheist Bus Campaign launches today thanks to Comment is free readers. Because of your enthusiastic response to the idea of a reassuring God-free advert being used to counter religious advertising, the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" could now become an ad campaign on London buses – and leading secularists have jumped on board to help us raise the money.

Their picture:


And here is my original mock up:


Mine is admittedly less positive and more definite - but whatayagonnado?

However since then I have come to the conclusion that there isn't anything inherently wrong with a belief in God, just as long as belief does not become the basis of any kind of temporal power or influence.

I can empathise with the faithful, even if I don't agree with them.

Still, I applaud this agenda of atheist expression.

{Money? What money? Give it to Amnesty I say!}

[images from the Graun and SideLong on flickr]

A Problem...

I just thought of something: when you say "Christian" or "Catholic" or "Muslim" you immediately think of someone who has adopted a particular set of ideas and beliefs. These beliefs will generally include:

1. A belief in God, and a belief in some kind of personal relationship with God
2. A belief that the world is the way it is because of God's will
3. A particular moral code and lifestyle

When you say "atheist" the first two are essentially the opposite:

1. There is no God
2. The world is the way it is for reasons other than God or the supernatural

Number 3. is absent. There is no immediate identification with any kind of moral or ethical code in atheism.

I appreciate that Dawkins, Hitchens et al are approaching the problem from the front end - attempting to persuade those who have settled into lazy agnosticism to actually express their atheism openly.

Morality is ultimately a creation of people - not God - and as such atheists should be clear that whilst they reject God, irrationality, and the power structures these things support they are in fact advocating morality more strongly than religionists.

Atheists strip away the fretwork and tinsel of religious ceremony and expose the uncomfortable truths that we are all profoundly alone (in the sense that there is no omnipotent divine being) and our only comfort is in each other and as such we should support and respect each other as best we can.

Atheists should be clear that morality is everything. There is no cosmic scorecard, only the people who surround us, how they judge us and how we judge ourselves.