Suboptimist

Comments from the Peanut Gallery.

I find it terribly ironic when fan clubs devoted to Sam Harris pop up on Facebook. A group of followers of an atheist thinker to gather and rally against theism with evangelical zeal seems remarkably odd to me. One of the discussions in the Facebook group I linked to I found particularly interesting. The thread is entitled, “Harris vs. Dawkins.” The first paragraph of the first post reads:

While Dawkins has impressive credentials (with his seat at Oxford), his most recent book The God Delusion falls down hard when making coherant [sic] arguments against the faithful. While I respect the mans effort in organizing the non-religious (especially atheists) politically, his most recent work is just not as intellectually robust as Harris’s The End of Faith.

When I read this paragraph, I don’t see a reasoned discussion about the arguments made by Sam Harris as opposed to Richard Dawkins. What I see is a discussion about the comparative writing and reasoning ability of the two men. This is the way critics write (I am writing as a critic now). This is also the way competing religious polemicists write. I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if their dream came true.

There is an old saying: the masses are asses. If you have a group of, say, one hundred people off the streets, I would wager that five to ten are capable of leading intellectually. The other ninety would only be capable of following. The followers become the most zealous. This is the way religions progress within fifty years of their founding, and is the way secular movements are prone to develop. Honestly, religion may be baloney (I personally believe it has plenty to offer), but it is baloney with a future. It can be seen in the way opponents of religion need their own organizations to counter it. Perhaps dogmatism aids in perpetuating the species.

In other news, I was thinking about game theory applied to player-versus-player combat in MMOs while driving between Huntsville and Salt Lake. There is a great debate among the player-bases of these games about survivability and damage dealing. For example, the mage (an offensive spell caster) class in World of Warcraft has, hands down, the lowest survivability in the game, and should be able to trade survivability for the ability to introduce other players to a world of pain. In reality, the mage class is gimped. Other classes can put out comparable or more damage but have far greater survivability and utility. Players who roll mage like to cry about this, really, it isn’t that big of a problem.

There is a concept called first-mover advantage. In PVP, this can be interpreted that in world play (as opposed to controlled battleground play), your chances of victory (here defined as reducing your opponent’s HP to zero while keeping yours greater than zero), all things being equal, are greatly increased if you engage an enemy player. If he engages you, your chance of survival, all things being equal, is greatly decreased. If a mage keeps this in mind, meaning he makes the first move, his survivability is no greater than that of a healing, damage-dealing shadow priest.

Of course, not everything is necessarily equal. The PVP system in WoW is, at least in part, gear based. A well geared player can own another’s face, even if he is taken by surprise. Ganking, or engaging a player while he is engaged in PVE doesn’t really count. The player being ganked stands no chance.

As for a quick update on my summer reading: I am reading through the Lord of the Rings series again. I am about half-way through the second book right now. I am also reading two biographies. On about General William Tecumseh Sherman, and the other about abolitionist John Brown. I am working on my Arabic so I can take the CASA exam for a fellowship in Syria in 2008, and would like to find time to work on some Hebrew. Time time time.