As I wait in joyful hope for the coming of my saviour and patch for the game Torchlight II, I read arbitrarily on the internet. I started with this shared on Facebook:
So I Googled E Frenkel. It strikes me as a story that somebody made up, but that doesn’t matter. First I found a Darwin awards page. Boring. One can only read the same joke so many times.
Then I found this… It’s one of a series of essays, this one about belief. Although it doesn’t start too well, referring to a deluded Russian psychic who probably didn’t exist, and near the beginning it refers to some other people with strongly held beliefs, strong enough to put faith before their lives. Too bad one of those people also probably didn’t exist. (Jesus of Nazareth.) But otherwise, it’s an interesting and thought-provoking essay. It’s worth reading if you have time to kill – especially if you’re downloading a time-throttled and large patch from a site full of pirated software…
Update: Actually I’m really glad I found those essays. They are worth reading, though not at work because they are lengthy and need to be read slowly as well as carefully to comprehend and retain. This one is about beliefs, including causality, and causal versus equivalence relationships. Having not yet read enough of the essays to understand where their “modeling”, which they define as “the process of usefully describing those structures of experience that give rise to human abilities”, is leading, but I am intrigued.
Skeptical Exaddict 