When you debate honestly with a shameless liar, reality has already lost. Public debates are garbage if truth is not the first, last, and only goal for both sides. The deck is stacked from the beginning in favor of poor logic and outright falsehood.
I just got back from a debate about "whether gay rights should triumph over Biblical morals". It was a travesty, and entirely predictable. On one side was Hector Avalos, a reasonable and soft-spoken professor of Biblical studies. On the other side was some bigoted yahoo with a radio talk show, named Jan Mickelson. Can you guess who was on which side?
Avalos came out with pretty standard, solid arguments. There was some interesting material about the history of the times when the Bible was written. The problem is that he talked softly and used big words, and he was honor-bound to be reasonable. Mickelson talked several decibels louder, had a folksy manner about him, and cracked jokes to distract the crowd from the vacuousness of everything he said. He monopolized the time, he got most of the crowd cheering for him, and he used a tactic called the Gish Gallop.
The Gish Gallop (named after the creationist Duane Gish) is a simple and very effective debate tactic: if you hit the audience with lies and distortions fast enough, nobody will be able to distinguish truth from lies. It works great when you have the audience rooting for you, and it can only be used by people who don't care about reality.
And make no mistake, this guy was all about the lies. According to Mickelson, the earth was created a few thousand years ago and gay people are a hoax. This is not an honest man. And that's how he won the debate.
This is why debates should be done in writing. It may not be as theatrical, and it may require people to read (oh no!), but in writing the truth stands a chance. A deceitful debater can't rip off a bunch of lies and expect to get away with it in writing. Points can be explained as more than sound bites in writing.
Face to face public debates need to die, so that honesty has a chance.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Final exams, part 4: Asynchronous systems
At last, finals are over and the semester is complete! The last final was not really an exam at all. It was a presentation. We all had to do a final project, and then give a talk about it. And because this is my favorite class, I decided to overachieve like a bandit.
Instead of doing a final project, I did five final projects. One of them was writing a paper. One of them was modifying a program from the University of Manchester to work properly with Quartus II. Then I made a random number generator in hardware, and some more hardware for 16-bit cyclic redundancy checking. And a simulator for sets of production rules, which can also use IRSIM to do transistor-level simulations. You might say that I went a little nuts.
The reason I did all this is because this class was actually very, very interesting. It was aimed at graduate students (and I think I'm technically enrolled as a grad student for some reason) and the material was only dumbed down slightly! This has some good points and bad points.
Let's get the bad part out of the way first: a lot of people had trouble. For example, a homework project might have been assigned a week or two in advance, but when it comes due I'm sometimes the only person to have it done. The class included practical work and reading real research papers, and I guess that can be a little intimidating.
The good part is that it's something useful and interesting that you can really sink your teeth into. Some research papers are remarkably accessible, and the practical work is at least manageable. Let me give an example.
Here's a paper on how we might be making computers in five years. It talks about a neat new way of fabricating electronics called a nanowire crossbar array, and while it's stupendously tiny it's also not suitable to the way we design processors today. Imagine electrical signals as water slowly spreading through wires, and you need to ensure that water reaches a thousand faucets at the same time, but you don't control the plumbing. How can you do it? You can't. This is similar to the problem of clock distribution: all conventional processors require that you send a really fast signal to all parts of the chip, keeping it all synchronized like a coxswain on a rowboat. And you can't do that on a crossbar array. But using asynchronous techniques, you can make a processor on it. The processor will just be very different from almost every other processor ever made. Exciting to be on the forefront of a big new thing, isn't it?
When I came here I decided that I would use some of my Copious Free Time to go overboard on something worthwhile. This is it, and I'm glad I put in the extra effort.
Instead of doing a final project, I did five final projects. One of them was writing a paper. One of them was modifying a program from the University of Manchester to work properly with Quartus II. Then I made a random number generator in hardware, and some more hardware for 16-bit cyclic redundancy checking. And a simulator for sets of production rules, which can also use IRSIM to do transistor-level simulations. You might say that I went a little nuts.
The reason I did all this is because this class was actually very, very interesting. It was aimed at graduate students (and I think I'm technically enrolled as a grad student for some reason) and the material was only dumbed down slightly! This has some good points and bad points.
Let's get the bad part out of the way first: a lot of people had trouble. For example, a homework project might have been assigned a week or two in advance, but when it comes due I'm sometimes the only person to have it done. The class included practical work and reading real research papers, and I guess that can be a little intimidating.
The good part is that it's something useful and interesting that you can really sink your teeth into. Some research papers are remarkably accessible, and the practical work is at least manageable. Let me give an example.
Here's a paper on how we might be making computers in five years. It talks about a neat new way of fabricating electronics called a nanowire crossbar array, and while it's stupendously tiny it's also not suitable to the way we design processors today. Imagine electrical signals as water slowly spreading through wires, and you need to ensure that water reaches a thousand faucets at the same time, but you don't control the plumbing. How can you do it? You can't. This is similar to the problem of clock distribution: all conventional processors require that you send a really fast signal to all parts of the chip, keeping it all synchronized like a coxswain on a rowboat. And you can't do that on a crossbar array. But using asynchronous techniques, you can make a processor on it. The processor will just be very different from almost every other processor ever made. Exciting to be on the forefront of a big new thing, isn't it?
When I came here I decided that I would use some of my Copious Free Time to go overboard on something worthwhile. This is it, and I'm glad I put in the extra effort.
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