Guided busway scheduled to open in August

http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/transport/around/thebusway/

There's another proposed date for the opening of the Busway[1], less than a month off. Actual physical buses have been seen on it ("you wait for two years, and two come along, all at once...") The website has timetables and so on.

I wouldn't get your hopes up yet, but it sounds like they really mean it this time.

And more to the point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway#cite_note-bbc-handover-73), apparently Nuttal finished the busway to their satisfaction, and so the busway was finally officially handed over to the council, and then the council were free to hire someone else to fix it, which means that the council may still be in court trying to recover the costs from Nuttal (?) but the legal disagreements are (hopefully) no longer a prerequisite to getting it finished (hopefully, in fact, they've already DONE that, although I don't have a citation).

[1] The guided busway, commonly called the misguided busway. But honestly, if it exists, I'd rather it works than failed out of spite, even if I don't think it was a good idea to start with.

Comparing "It's better to know the truth" to "Good people go to heaven"

A standard warning is to avoid basing your actions on something being true simply because you want it to be true, not because you've any reason to think it is. Eg. Everyone agrees that "The ship can't be sinking, that would be terrible" is understandable if there's nothing you can do about it, but catastrophic if you're in charge of planning for lifeboats. But "There must be meaning in the universe, because otherwise it would be terrible" sounds very seductive, but is not conclusive for exactly the same reason!

However, a related but subtly different case, is something you want to believe because the effects of beleiving it are true. If believing X makes you or other people act in good ways, you are massively incentivised to want to believe X, and to hope X is true, and even to avoid any doubts about X, even if they're reasonable.

I think this is understandable and possibly wise, even though it leads to a sort of double-think of mainting the illusion that X, while simultaneously evaluating the truth of X, and trying to investigate alternatives to X, without ever admitting that's what you're doing.

However, I had a very startled moment, when I realised that many supposed rationalists (including me) tended to believe like an article of faith that it's better to make decisions based on true information. Yes, I think that's in general true. But if hypothetically I provided a celebrated atheist rationalist with evidence convincing in his/her eyes that actually, beleiving a popular religion WAS much more beneficial to humanity, would they go ahead and change their mind? In almost all cases, probably not.

That sounded understandable, but I realised that it was exactly the same process that many people use to justify a belief in heaven: that true or not, it's desirable that it's true, and then it's beneficial to believe it, so lets not rock the boat. Putting those two next to each other made me suddenly very uncertain.

Edinburgh

I'll be in Edinburgh with Liv this weekend, with time on Sat and most of Sun. What should I see? (I've previously been to Edinburgh castle, Elephant House teashop, and the national gallery.)