Richard Dawkins - The Root of All evil; Monday 09/01/05 Channel 4

"Hello, I'm a Useless Prick"

The one good thing I can think of to say about Dawkins is that he's married to Lalla Ward, therefore their children might inherit brains from one parent at least. Someone who is prepared to say humans are the pinnacle of evolution, what life on earth is for (Cambridge lecture, 3 years ago); or that varous parts of his theory of evolution rely on faith to be true (Jonathon Miller's atheism programme on C4 a few weeks ago) is perhaps not someone we should hold up as a great scientific thinker.

here is an interview with dawkins from today's sunday herald, in which he says:

"This programme just might open some eyes to the fact that you don’t have to believe this stuff, that it’s OK to be an atheist. It’s a bit like being gay 30 years ago, when it was necessary to consciously come out of the closet. I’m hoping that I may sway people in that middle category, who might be shaken into thinking about it.”

sadly, i fear he will be so didactic, so - heh - fanatical, that it will be far too easy for anyone with even the slightest (admittedly irrational) interest in preserving their faith to dismiss him out of hand.

Having said that, those kind of stats are just based on what people profess when surveyed, and it iprobably IS something like 80% of people who don't give a serious fuck about religion. And that is the problem. People don't give a serious fuck about what their principles are full-stop. (People who let their kid to be baptised just to get in a catholic school, even if they're atheist. Take a stand, will ya! Be consistent!)

1http://www.live8live.com/images/jpegs/left-dvd.jpg

But if you're atheist or agnostic, why should you care if they wanna pour a little water on your kid's head? My non-churchgoing wife was kind of interested in having our son baptized -- for no particular reason except that everyone in her family had been baptized and it would be a chance to take cute pictures -- and I was fine with it. I don't care. I'll pass on whatever thoughts I have about all these things to him, and he can take it from there as he chooses. (I did ask my wife which church exactly she had in mine, seeing as how we've never set foot in one. She was stumped and I haven't hears anything about it since. But if at some point she goes and finds a church that'll baptize him, s'OK with me.)

Why as an athiest should you care about anything other than being a selfish prick? DO ideas matter?

Because if it is, although I'm not an admirer of Dawkins, I don't see how anyone can think it such a terrible thing to ridicule Christians for being irrational. "Oh, you're so intolerant! Mocking my belief that you're so evil you should burn in hellfire for the rest of eternity!"

Its not a terrible thing, its just not that productive to ridicule others like Dawkins does, hes not so smart. You think YOURE rational and others arent, fine no skin off my nose, makes me smile if you really want to know, kind of like Live 8 makes me want to scream in desparation

No...not really.

well, i'm a devout atheist: rather like dawkins, i genuinely believe the world would be a better place if people didn't believe in any concept of "god". so i think that adopting a couple of bits of someone else's creed just in order to get your kid into a better school (yes, it happens here in the UK a lot) is vastly hypocritical, and morally dubious too. for me, atheism isn't just an absence of belief; it's an active denial of faith. it is, if you like, a moral code.

also: i respect the fact that vast swaths of the populace are so irrational/scared/confused that they need something to believe in, and i respect the fact that some of them take these beliefs very seriously. if someone masqueraded as a journalist, i would take it as a professional insult; therefore i think that masquerading as - say - a devout christian is equally abhorrent.

that said: i'm the godfather to a child who was baptised in the church of scotland by two parents who never go to church. and yes, i went to the service and stood there like a spare prick at ... er, a christening, simply because i was too scared of falling out with my friends to say: "no fucking way, piss off." so who's the hypocrite now?

so much for the moral code of atheism, it seems. ah, fuck it. at least i don't believe i'm going to hell.

The core of his theory of consciousness is the "multiple drafts" model. In the multiple drafts model consciousness is not a unitary process but rather a distributed one (just as a novel in preparation may exist in multiple drafts at any one time and is only afterwards "finalised"). Sequential timing of events breaks down at small (millisecond) time scales within the brain, and the events that make up consciousness cannot be ordered. In short there is no central place in the brain/mind where everything is presented and decisions are made (the fallacy of the "Cartesian Theatre"). The evidence for this view of consciousness is a whole series of results from experiments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

(and anyone who's ever dealt with 3-year-olds can tell you that consciences are learned as much or more as they are intrinsic. you have to be told why it's a bad idea to hit other kids in the head with blocks.)

The core argument against central control processors (or homunculi) is this: if the process is being controlled, what is controlling the controller? Any answer to this question makes the homunculus a free agent (therefore, not something that can be studied in a causal environment such as an experiment) or ineffective (since a control processor that is not really in control is not a control processor.

What I really want to say though is jeez people, we are organisms without free will, just like the mud wasp and the worm, only more complicated. In fact, we are complicated worm food. No matter how educated or brilliant a person is, they will never accept this if it scares them. It is very confronting to face stuff like this - but how ridiculous we look when we refuse to do so.

i think you get into interesting but tendentious waters there, because "free will" itself needs some definition. we've already seen that supercomputers will occasionally make inexplicable decisions in chess games, and humans are working with processors a hell of a lot more complicated than supercomputers. what's the boundary between random error and conscious decision? (like, i put this pawn here because i want to, not because i meant to move the bishop.) our decisions and actions are obviously the product of huge amounts of input but they are also at some level ours.

"Some wasps are able to sting people painfully, but there are more wasps that have a rather unpleasant character. There are lots of wasps that lay their eggs in other animals, which are then completely eaten by the larva of the wasp. Some wasps simply deposit there eggs on other insects, but some are ready to go to all lengths, such as the spiderwasps. For their larva they seek a much bigger victim, e.g. a spider larger than they are themselves. They sting the spider, which deadens the animal. They then take it to the nest, put the spider in and deposit an egg in or near the spider and seal the nest. Because the spider is just deadened, not killed, the larva has a fresh meal when it hatches. Below you see a very common Spider Wasp going about with a deadened victim. In order to make transportation of the victim easier, this species often bites off a few or all of the victims legs. So it is a good thing the wasp uses some kind of anaesthetic!"

What's the current Christian orthodox view of atheists? I was under the impression that it used to be that someone who denied there was a God was destined for eternal damnation. a) Was that ever actually the case? b) Is it still the case?

No idea about orthodox stians, but when I was broadcasting fundie xtian tv there was a segment on one of the kids shows about what to do if you met an atheist (politely run away and go tell a pastor I think). Unfortunately they didn't have a how to spot an atheist segment, that would have been hilarious.

Rigorous, very rigorous.

"However the process plays out (science vs religion), it demands open discussion and unwavering intellectual rigor in an atmosphere of mutual respect."

Edward O Wilson

Why did they want their child baptised then?

'Good people do good things, evil people do evil things, for good people to do evil things it takes Communism'

'Good people do good things, evil people do evil things, for good people to do evil things it takes Nazism'

'Good people do good things, evil people do evil things, for good people to do evil things it takes Capitalism'

etc.

Ha ha, well, denying this almost implies they're just inherently bad, but yes it's much more complex than either of these views.

No, Dawkins' is point is that because of religion they think they're doing good. They've become twisted through blind faith and weren't necessarily "evil" people to begin with.
Now, of course bad things are done in the name of many causes, but religion is especially dangerous because of its irrationality.

From reading Dawkins' essays I can see a more complex and reasoned critique of religion than his rhetorical soundbites imply.

fuck knows. to keep her father happy? out of some primeval panicking fear: "well, we'd better, just in case he GOES TO HELL if we don't?" conformity?

i don't know, and if i'd being doing my godfatherly duties properly i'd have questioned them about it. instead i just went: "hmm, whatever, ok" and went through with it. gypsy mothra, your comment is kind - and appreciated - but i really, really regret not having the courage of my convictions at the time. that said: it was more than five years ago.

Ritual excuse for a wet-the-baby's-head pissup? The same reason non-religious people get married in churches?

In fact, when cornered, he resorts to the same kind of "I'm right, you're wrong cause I said so." bullshit.

Even worse, he's one of the loudest atheist voices putting evolution against creationism and making belief in either them exclusive. You can believe in both. One doesn't negate the other. Science and religion can be in harmony.

Dawkins doesn't want them to be and deliberately insults priests and things just to help build the wall. He tried to start a ban on the Theology Department at his university because it was useless. Even if you don't believe, I think studying theology as a cultural force is probably a useful thing. It's at least as useful as string theory research has been. Isn't ignorance the exact thing he purports to be fighting when he criticizes religion?

m.

Although Science often relies on mere theories (Big Bang etc.) rather than proven tests, almost adopting the latter mentality at times (we're going to assume the Big Bang happened because it is the 'most' 'logical' 'explanation').

And, I also enjoy looking into religions themselves - without being a subscriber - in much the same the same way that I enjoy learning about the philosophical structures of Freud and Hegel for example. I think Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism are fascinating cultural artifacts, and high peaks of philosophy in their own way.

I think the problem is fundamentalism in any area, rather than religion as such.

odd how "fundamentalism" changed.
m.

And all that beautiful architecture...that's the funny thing, my tolerance for heavy religion/heavily religious people has never been lower or more tested than now, but so much great art to have been inspired by it.

the thing is, science can't tell you anything much about morality... but religion can't tell us anything about natural science. so while the american xtian right is out of its frickin' tree with 'intelligent design', i don't think 'science' can tell us things about 'good' and 'evil' people.

You can live with both the scientific and religious mindsets simultaneously as long as you're willing to strictly demarcate the areas in which they can apply. i.e. Science = actual facts about the physical universe vs Religion = spirituality and ways of being. What gets some religious people into trouble is that they put their boundaries in the wrong place.

I, being a "radical atheist", would argue that the spiritual/religious viewpoint is purely a product of the imagination or some temporary mental state. Which makes it interesting but not necessarily a good thing to live by. If you do want to hang your ethical framework and worldview on it you're quite welcome to do so. Everyone is allowed to be wrong after all.

I don't mean to suggest that religion hasn't produced good things. I think people do unpleasant things for all sorts of reasons. Religion is one of those, sure. I only mean to suggest that scientific understanding is in conflict with theology. Atheist scientists don't engage in arguments with bishops on street corners, for the most part, because it would be a waste of time for both, not because there are ways of harmonising the two systems of thought.

I don't know whether science can tell you things about morality but I don't see why religion should have the monopoly. It's possible to be an ethically-minded person and be an atheist too, after all.

i don't think 'science' can tell us things about 'good' and 'evil' people

I don't think 'good' and 'evil' are particularly useful terms for understanding human behaviour, which is one of the reasons I don't think religion is that helpful either.

IF i am nice to other people THEN i feel an altruistic buzz AND
IF i am nice to other people THEN they will be happy

IF people are happy THEN they will in turn be nicer to everybody else

etc

ok, there are flaws all through that but i have seen that "altruism is logical" argument done quite well - probably in this, which i would recommend as interesting reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the points raised in this excellent thread.

"i'm teh son of god, come to save you a ... OW, CHRIST ALMIGHTY! STOP HITTING ME WITH THAT TRUNCHEON! JESUS, THAT WAS SORE" etc

Actually I think they can be based on logic. I don't think you need religion as a prop to hang a social or ethical code upon. You can do that, without recourse to the supernatural, by appealing to most people's simple desire to have a quiet life. In that respect treating others as you would wish them to treat you is the only logical way to live.

re: Evolutionary reasons for religion.
If you recall that most compettion comes from members of one's own species and that humans generally compete by doing sneaky things to one another. Then the tendancy to believe that there's some kind of conscious (or malevolent) thought behind even the most innoccuous of events might actually be something that can be selected for.

i don't think religion is trying to provide a thorough explanation of astronomy/biology though. trying to read a creation story as a detailed fact book is foolish. and i think the authors (people from the "stone age"!) even knew that.

some of my atheist friends are some of the most moral/ethical people i know. they're not good because someone told them to be, but because they genuinely believe in love and respect. and so do i. obedience of my God is sort of a by-product of the fact that i want to love and respect people. (which may or may not be a product of me trying to listen to what Jesus taught.)

if Christians as a mass could concentrate on love and respect and charity and humility and kindness, the usefulness of religion might not be in question.
m.

i'd forgotten about this show. i'll definitely watch it, especially now i've read some thoughts on the subject. i'd like to agree with everything dawkins says, basically, but i can't see that happening.

Can anyone tell me the main tenets of the anti-Darwin movement? Is it 100% based on religion?

...in flagrant violation of fair trade practices! I say to you - when the very whores on the street can be mistaken for women, then the apocalypse is nigh.

mental, yes, but not unrepresentative.

http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/printer_22101.shtml

i don't know how to react to this with words.

mark steyn on muslim rapists.

If he doesn't do this in part two, he's a total fucknut and the entire show's a waste of effort.

Yes, precisely, that's how the hour-long first episode struck me. At the very least, it's covering ground far too slowly for anyone with even a passing interest in this sort of thing. What's the nutshell theme for part two?

Next episode is entitled "Vicars: Don't They Talk a Load of Shit?"

"Dennet and other 'cognitive neuroscientists' of course have a stake in the false notion that the non-existence of a central processor or executive controller in the brain is a new idea (discovered by them)."

is wrong. first off there is quite an active strain of cognitive science that very much stresses Buddhist practices! http://cognews.com/1063410698/index_html. So secondly saying that anyone has a "stake in it" is being invidious for no good reason.

I believe he tries to ignore creationists, on the grounds that deigning to argue with them only gives them publicity. The same may be true of intelligent design. This would be indefensible head-sand-burrying were this show going out in parts of the world where there are actual creationists, but there are so few in the UK that I'm inclined to say he's got a point.

There are even less IDers in the UK (which is a bonkers creed invented the lovely people at Seattle's Discovery Institute), to the extent that the only people who have heard of it are sneering post-Englightenment liberals like you and I, and we all know it's pigswill already.

His Guardian piece after 11/9, which even I was offended by at the time, has aged rather well:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,552388,00.html

"Science = actual facts about the physical universe vs Religion = spirituality and ways of being. What gets some religious people into trouble is that they put their boundaries in the wrong place."

Too true, but more relevant on ILX is that what gets some "scientific" people into trouble is that they put their boundaries in the wrong place.

Asserting that all sorts of speculative theories (well more often dodgy hypotheses) on anything from how our minds work to the origin of the universe are "actual facts".

-- Stone Monkey (stonemonke...), January 9th, 2006.

there's no moral imperative to act in this quasi-logical way though. as to the evolutionary causes of religion -- this is one hell of a lot more controversial than most evolution theory goes, and as far as i can work out it wouldn;t invalidate religion or moralistic worldviews anyway; after all, you could find an evolutionary reason for scientific research based on similar ideas of competition, but that wouldn't invalidate science.

Sheesh I was working witht the def given, but no Ive never studied philosophy or any of the arts at all, and yes I failed english at school and yes I am dyslexic but Id like to learn so...

he didn't say a lot about it but it seemed to be about how religion propogates throughout generations. ah:

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/rootofevil.html

"Next week: The Virus of Faith"

my 'nutter' alarm did go off about a sentence into his various chats with the religious people but then, thinking about it, he himself used the phrase Nuremburg Rally within seconds of meeting the Evangelist so...

when it comes down to it there is still a lot of leeway in "actual facts", in that some (ok, yes mental) people will disagree with the fact that say forms of life on the planet have been different in the past, and others with the fact of speciation, but they would not question the fact that the earth is solid, has a molten core, that their great-great-grandparents existed, that other planets exist, and so on

re; "actual facts"
If we're going to be especially picky then science says absolutely nothing about the true nature (if there is one) of the universe, as that is something we can never know. Most people who do science probably believe that what they do has a bearing on the real universe (whatever that is) inasmuch as it gives them a better idea of how it may function.

now there's an untestable hypothesis.

What science says may coincidentally coincide with the true nature of the universe, but it doesn't claim to be more than a model.

that was what annoyed me about it: as others have said upthread, there's a tremendously patronising smugness to dawkins's brand of rational atheism, and i don't find it surprising that he rubbed some of his interviewees up the wrong way. as an atheist, i was hoping to learn a little more from his interviewees about why they are so ready to believe; i can't help but feel that a less confrontational approach from RD might have been more rewarding for us as viewers. as it was, most of the time all i thought was: hmm, here's an oxbridge professor talking down to us all. it certainly didn't cause me to engage my brain once, which i think is a pretty major failing for such a programme.

Is this what Dawkins would say to Da Vinci, Newton, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy or Pascal if he were to have a conversation with them about their Christian faith? Because he might sound a little ignorant. Just a thought.

His most famous work is probably 'The Seven-Storey Mountain,' which tells the story of how he changed from a being a succesful young writer living in New York to a Trappist (the most rigid from of Catholic monasticism).

Nutter: I believe in x
Richard: But why??
Nutter: Because I do.
Richard: :(

It would be nice if he'd made the point to the fundy whackos doing their "Hell House" (or whatever the fuck it was) grotesquerie, that if you do good things because you're scared of going to Hell, that's exactly where you'll end up because you were being utterly selfish. The only way good acts get you into Heaven is if you do them for their own sake. Pascal's wager is not a sure bet.

Presumably he wouldn't because he doesn't take them seriously enough to argue with them on their own terms.

You mean "adding machine".

yeah, but the type of fundamentalist Protestant denominations that hold "Hell Houses" don't believe doing good works or not doing good works are what get you into heaven or hell. you are only saved by the grace of god, by accepting jesus as your personal savior.

This is deeply deeply unfair to both Dennett, and Dawkins to a lesser extent. Gould also made excellent contributions to the field he went on to popularise.

Which would seem to imply that you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you believe you have been born again. Which strikes me as quite astoundingly amoral.

It's "deeply, deeply" unfair, and not just rude and snarky of me to say? Why? Granted that Dennett isn't wasting all his time now trying to convert religious believers with a hammer (and "brights" was the stupidest idea ever BTW), but I've run into too many young would-be philosophy supergenii who are happy to blather about "intuition pumps" and misapprehended stuff from Gödel, Escher, Bach but seemingly haven't read anything else at all. One such young buck in an ethics class of mine last semester prompted a classic comment from my prof: "Think about what you're saying! Daniel Dennett is an improvement on Kant?!?" Mostly I'm just annoyed that the "100 greatest intellectuals" thing is always decades behind the curve-- people read Gould and Dawkins now to argue against their theories, no? Stuff the popularity contest-- I want to know who's doing good work now!

faith vs. works is not one of my favorite theological topics. it feels like splitting hairs at times. it's also a major point of disagreement between various branches of the church.

m.

m.

Where did the last twenty years thing come from anyway? As most intellectuals do their best work early on, its kind of unfair to pick on Dawkins that he's still not doing more work along the lines of the stuff he did in the 60s and 70s. and then after that he MOVED ON to communicating science in a popular way - something which is admirable on its own terms, and which he did brilliantly. at first. if you compare his well known early stuff with some of the turgid "pop genetics" lit coming out at the mo, it really stands up.

i've not been a fan of his (or his approach) in the last 10 or so years. as i've said here on ilx, i think it's harmed the image of science more than is healthy for someone who is (was?) professor for the advancement of science.

i was primarily defending Dennett. i studied philosophy of mind, not biology. (and that was under 20 years ago if it matters). I was specifically interested in the difference between him and a couple others (Rorty n so on) wrt varieties of realism in respect to "beliefs" and classes of entities. i've not read any of his academic stuff since the 90s. but i gather he's far from being considered a burned out man with nothing left to contribute.

His publishing history, AFAIK from the philosophy of biology stuff I've had to read. The other stuff did occur to me before after my first post and I thought I was being slightly silly then. But since you called me out on something I wrote off the cuff a week ago, I wanted you to elaborate anyway.

but i gather he's far from being considered a burned out man with nothing left to contribute.

I don't think I ever said this-- it's the GEB effect that annoys me in regards to him more than anything else (I can walk into any Half Price Books probably and find something by Hofstadter or Dennett-- could you say the same thing about Richard Rorty or, I dunno, the Churchlands?). Some of his stuff I like (not "Quining Qualia" though), even the pop science stuff.

wrt varieties of realism in respect to "beliefs" and classes of entities

??? I'd be interested if you elaborated.

ha, in my (rubbish) dissertation i kind of ripped into Quining Qualia - it didn't ring consonant with his other stuff at all.

when this was my thing, there was a lot of chat about D's "instrumentalist" approach to beliefs, and the literature at the time was awash with a variety of attitudes suggested (between the extremes of Fodor's hardcore realism and Rorty's universal "who cares"). D's point always was that beliefs are a special order of thing, and i remember making the point that this approach made it entirely inappropriate to label it instrumentalism. In'ism being principally used as a pejorative emphasising the gap between reality and representation - when such a gap is just not possible when you adopt D's approach as a whole. neither did it mean his entire approach was instrumentalist. there was some key paper about patterns.

blimey, i'm getting really fuzzy here. anyway, that sort of thing. while we're on this my favourite Dennett line was his coining of the phrase that the "self is a centre of narrative gravity". that was like the jackpot for me. and i see it (or the idea) popping up all over the place - though prob because it keyed in to many things already out there, but the point is that that way of expressing it was brilliant. he's good with words that way.

How so? I didn't think that Dennett was a direct realist (and that doesn't seem to be what you're saying).

there was some key paper about patterns.

If this was the thing about the necessity of error involved in boiling down complex data inputs to workable abstractions, this was the paper of his I read that I liked the most.

D's stance is based on a more fundamental question of what it makes sense to be realist, or not, about. eg what would it mean to be non-realist about a story or a tune (i think these might be examples he actually gave, so forgive me). realism is kicked around/discussed largely wrt the ontology of the physical sciences. in proposing "how the world is" there is the capacity for a gap between the reality and the representation (well "theory X" wasn't right), which leads to a variety of "instrumentalist" attitudes - where we are just "saving the phenomena" and abandonding the hope of corresponding to reality. and it's precisely "correspondence" that doesn't always hold in other ontological realms.

the Churchlands are (were?) (coarsely) non-realist about beliefs saying that there really was no such thing, but D says (and i paraphrase) "this is madness" (so say we all) "not only do we have beliefs, but it's such a robust concept that is used in a variety of explanatory narratives." this lies at the core of D's "intentional stance" approach to psychology. not only do beliefs exist but they HAVE to exist from the "boiling down complex data" thing. they exist if the data does.

the correspondence problem is taken to another level, viz a belief ABOUT a belief could be wrong, and as such beliefs may or may not be true.

will this do?

I watched Richard Dawkins going on about alternative medicine tonight in his Channel 4 series Enemies of Reason.

I thought there were some interesting ideas raised...

(perhaps despite Dawkins' rather Sixth form 'I'm right, you are wrong - and it's not me saying that, it's science! ' arguments. I nearly always find myself agreeing with what Dawkins says (at least to some extent), but I don't think he does himself any favours in his TV documentaries - this is in direct contrast to his writing style which I find lucid, well argued and witty.)

... such as the idea of a placebo industry (no, not the bald wannabe goth-dwarf); where the whole idea of alternative medicine is provide the most persuasive, and therefore most succesful, placebo.

I am fascinated by the idea of whether practioners are aware that what they practice is placebo - whether they are doing it purely for the money or to help people. There was one medically qualified doctor on the show who I thought was genuinely practising homeopathy in order to help his patients, but I couldn't work out whether he really believed in his 'cures', or was aware of the placebo effect and was exploiting it for the good of his patients.

wonder if tough-guy dawkins would be up for a scrap with, y'know, the pharmaceutical industry. what could be more rational than prescribing medication to pre-teens coz they get a bit snappy in class?

Does anyone actually read, watch or listen to Dawkins except to pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for having this frightfully clever man telling them exactly what they already believe?

judging by the success of the god delusion, i'd say yes.

Does anyone actually read, watch or listen to Dawkins when they pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for smugly dismissing him?

Dawkins and Hitchens should get do some kind of comedy routine

er "get together and do"

Hitch could be the obnoxious boorish drunk and Dawkins could be the stuffy straightman

I would watch all this reality tv program

shakey mo could be the obnoxious straightman

i liked the bit in that book where he used his v. old-skool computer to evolve insects

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Books/safari.gif

I have that floppy disc with my copy of Blind Watchmaker! Obv. never used it tho.

he does seem to be a bit less interested in belittlement in this new series (or at least the first episode; I didn't see the second one). Does he have any kind of philosophical background? Even as someone who has very little knowledge of the philosophy of science his thinking considered from that perspective seems to have some gaping holes in it, as portrayed on TV at least (probably not the best place to judge), along with his more obvious general philosophical flaws.

i think to be fair to him he was holding back during most of the interviews because most of these people seemed very nice which didn't allow him to cut into them like i expected him to.

gotta agree with alansmithee upthread, though. his written work is much much better.

Yes, he was *very* restrained with his interviewees this time around, letting them present their case and dig their own holes. Vast improvement, I thought.

http://i.imgur.com/BUIoF1W.png