Neutral Good???

Y’know those online quizzes that tell you what medieval philosopher you are, what kind of shoe you are, what kind of cheese you are, which member of the Rat Pack you are?

They’re apparently very popular.

I find them silly and almost never take them. (Though I did find out that the member of the Rat Pack I am is Frank Sinatra.)

WELL I COULDN’T RESIST TAKING THIS ONE.

It purports to tell you what your "alignment" is.

Alignment is a concept used in the game Dungeons & Dragons.

I hate it. (The concept of alignment, that is; I’m also not that big on D & D, which I view as a poorly-designed game, though other Role Playing Games are better.)

Alignment is one of the elements in D & D that I consider to be poor design.

Basically, alignment is supposed to tell you how your character behaves. It analyzes your character on two axes: whether he is (1) good, (2), neutral, or (3) evil and whether he is (a) lawful, (b) neutral, or (c) chaotic.

Thus a virtuous priest might be "lawful good" (concerned with principles directed toward good) and Osama bin Laden might be "lawful evil" (concerned with principles leading to evil).

A social activist might be "chaotic good" (unconcerned with principle but fixated on good) and a psychopath might be "chaotic evil" (unconcerned with principle and fixated on evil).

I don’t like alignment because (a) it unduly restrains characters (some races in the game are only allowed certain alignments) and (b) it encourages players to take a juvenile satisfaction in being evil.

Anyway, I took the alignment quiz.

I answered all the questions as honestly as I could, even those which wouldn’t reflect well on me.

I figured that my alignment would easily come back as lawful good. (I answered an awful lot of law questions in a positive manner, and in real life I am very concerned with matters of principle.)

Apparently, though, my alignment score was tied between two options, and the quiz asked me a clarifying question to see which principle was more important to me.

One of the tied options was indeed lawful good, but the other–the one the deciding question finally determined by alignment to be–was neutral good.

Surprise, surprise!

Here’s the quiz’s description of how a "neutral good" person behaves:

A Neutral Good person tries to do the
‘goodest’ thing possible. These people are willing to work with the law
to accomplish their goal, but if the law is corrupt they are just as
willing to tear it down. To these people, doing what’s right is the
most important thing, regardless of rules, customs, or laws.

Knowing this, I understood why the quiz rated me the way it did. While I am very concerned with lawkeeping (which is why my lawful good and neutral good scores were tied), I also recognize that human laws are subordinate to the moral law and must be changed when they are in confilict with it. (E.g., the current human law favoring abortion in America.) So I’m strong on lawkeeping but ultimately concerned that human law conforms to moral law.

Okay, so I’m neutral good.

I think St. Thomas ("He’s My Hero") Aquinas would be, too.

TAKE THE QUIZ.

(Cowboy hat tip: Ancient Illuminated Seers Of Bavaria.)

DVPeaves

What is it with people who make DVDs?

With purchaser expectations of extras and higher picture quality than what one gets on VHS, one would think that DVD manufacturers would take the customer service ethic seriously and make their DVDs as easy to use and non-annoying as possible.

But sometimes they do inexplicably frustrating things, particularly when putting TV shows on DVD.

Here are a few rules all DVD manufacturers should follow:

  1. Print the episode titles on the DVD so that the user doesn’t have to look at the box (which he won’t want to keep if he puts his DVDs in space-saving binders) to find the episode he wants. (Got that, Babylon 5?)
  2. Print the titles large enough that they are legible, so the user doesn’t have to squint. (Understand, Voyager?)
  3. Don’t have a looooong opening sequence that plays before the main menu EVERY TIME the user puts in the DVD and that CAN’T BE SKIPPED THROUGH (Capice, Next Gen?) In fact, make whatever opening you have skippable (Kudos to B5!).
  4. Make sure that there is a chapter break immediately after the opening credits so that the user can skip them and not end up way far into the story. (Why, after releasing seven seasons on DVD, haven’t you figured that out, Stargate SG-1?)
  5. Make sure that pressing PLAY has the function of making an episode . . . well . . . play. Having to hit ENTER to make and episode play when the PLAY key is dead is just stupid. (You savvy me, everybody?)
  6. Minimize the number of clicks that the user has to play the next episode. Don’t get so wrapped up in zoomy graphical menu designs that you force the user to push three or four buttons to navigate to the next episode. (What were you thinking, DS9 ?) or change the combination of buttons that need to be pushed (ditto, Voyager!).
  7. Having a "Play All" option is okay (nice try, B5), but how many users are really going to want to commit to sitting in front of the tube for three hours straight? Do the sensible thing and have NEXT EPISODE/PREVIOUS EPISODE options that immediately start playing the desired episode. (Why hasn’t anybody figured this out?)

And that’s my Andy Rooney moment for the day.

Crichton on How To Fix Science

Final excerpts from Crichton’s important speech:

And at the moment we have no mechanism to get good answers. So I will propose one.

Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research
to determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research
in other policy areas as well. Certainly the increased use of computer
models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make
the models from those who verify them. The fact is that the present
structure of science is entrepeneurial, with individual investigative
teams vying for funding from organizations which all too often have a
clear stake in the outcome of the research-or appear to, which may be
just as bad. This is not healthy for science.

Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in
this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by
private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be
pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The
institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular
area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement:
teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many
cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and
those who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to address
the land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on our
way to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place in
global warming, and therefore what seriousness we must address this.

READ THE WHOLE SPEECH.

Old Liturgical Myths Die Hard

Down yonder, a reader says:

In 2002 I went to confession on Saturday, December 8. I casually asked
the priest what time Masses were being celebrated that day, keeping in
mind that I had not yet fulfilled my obligation for that feast and that
evening Masses were common on Holy Days of Obligation. He told me that
the Mass to be celebrated that evening was the vigil Mass for the
following Sunday and couldn’t be used to fulfill the Immaculate
Conception obligation. I remember thinking that his statement didn’t
sound quite right, but I would like to know for certain. (I did assist
at Mass later that evening at another parish and it was the Mass of the
Immaculate Conception.)

What the priest told you is wrong.

He is one of a great many priests who has absorbed the idea that the theme of a particular Mass (or the readings it uses) are some how relevant to the Mass’s ability to fulfill you holy day obligation.

THEY AIN’T.

Thing to do in such a situation would be to go to the evening Mass and then go to another Mass the next day (in an eastern rite parish if you don’t want to hear the same readings again).

Near Miss

Earth narrowly avoided an "asteroid" strike Sunday when an "asteroid" whizzed past Earth so close that it went under the orbits of some satellites.

Fortunately, it was tiny (16 feet wide, which makes me wonder whether it should even be classed as an asteroid).

Wouldn’t have hurt us (or so they say).

It was the second-closest such miss on record.

GET THE STORY.

When Your Doctor Wants You Dead

This is no joke.

The U.K.’s present not-as-great-as-advertised administration is working a physician-assisted suicide bill through Parliament.

It is true that many religious groups vehemently
oppose the Joffe Bill, but they are not the only ones. They unite with
medical representatives and disabled groups, who fear that doctors’
judgements about ‘quality of life’ may imply that their own lives are
not worth living.

This is no abstract fear voiced by philosophers such as Baroness Warnock, as Jane Campbell, writing recently in The Times
(London), discovered. Campbell, who suffers from spinal muscular
atrophy, a muscle-wasting illness that means she cannot lift her head
from her pillow unaided, was hospitalised for a case of pneumonia. The
consultant treating her said that he assumed she would not want to be
resuscitated should she go into respiratory failure. When she protested
that she would like to be resuscitated, she was visited by a more
senior consultant who said that he assumed she would not want to be put
on a ventilator. According to the Disability Rights Commission, this
was not was not an isolated incident. As Campbell says, these incidents
‘reflect society’s view that people such as myself live flawed and
unsustainable lives and that death is preferable to living with a
severe impairment’ [SOURCE.].

The kind of experience Mrs. Campbell had is not rare. There is a profound ambivalence on the part of many in the medical community about keeping patients alive.

I know.

I’ve seen it.

When my wife was dying at age 27, the doctors and nurses and hospital administrators all put pressure on us to try to get her to agree not to insist on all the life-sustaining measures that were available. When she adamantly did insist on them (her specific words were "I. Want. To. Live."), they were dismayed and did a lot of grumbling and head shaking and eye rolling out of her presence (but not out of mine).

The medical community is in such danger of forgetting the Hippocratic Oath (which they no longer take)’s requirement to do no harm to the patient that we do not need the doorway of death opened any wider than it already is.

Too many doctors are already trying to shove patients through it out of false compassion–NOT because it will help the patient but because the doctors and nurses and administrators are wanting to keep costs down and because THEY are simply tired of having to take care of the patient and watch her suffer.

This obviously doesn’t apply to every doctor or nurse or administrator. Many still have their hearts in the right place. But many do not.

Too many.

Regarding Britain’s upcoming bill, THOUGHTFUL ATHEIST WRITES THOUGHTFUL ARTICLE AGAINST ASSISTED SUICIDE.

Crichton on "Scientific Consensus"

Continuing excerpts from Crichton’s important speech:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus

is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science

is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees

that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

MORE TOMORROW.

READ THE WHOLE SPEECH.