The most recent dramatic socio-political discourse based on infotainment (Guy goes on killing spree, people blame misogyny)

(I've been having a few interesting conversations on FaceBook lately.
I'm still processing where I want to go with several of the ideas that have been stirred up, but in the meantime I thought I'd share with yall a few select tidbits.)



I've said it before, and I'll say it again: anything that gets on the news is insignificant. You can tell by very virtue of the fact that it is on the news. It is exactly like the coverage of 500 people dieing in a plane crash, which happens once a decade, while there is exactly zero coverage of the 500 people who die in car crashes EVERY WEEK. We hear about it for months if a cop shoots an unarmed black man, but you've never heard the names of the 10 unarmed non-black men shot by cops in the first half of 2013. We pretend it is a major issue when, every once in a while, some crazy person shoots 10 people, but 30 people shoot one person each EVERY DAY in America. It just isn't dramatic news.
When something like this happens, we put all this emphasis on what that particular person was into, what must have motivated them. They were into satanism, they were into rock and roll, they smoked pot, they listened to violent rap music, they played violent video games, they were anarchists, they were backwoods dwelling preppers, they were anti-government, they were racist, they were cult members, they worked for the US Postal Service, they listened to Glenn Beck, they were a skin head - wrong. 
In all cases, wrong. 
There is no pattern. The most common reason for shooting sprees is getting fired, but even that's less than half. Thousands of people get fired every day and don't come back and kill their co-workers. 
Every once in a while, people go on killing sprees.
Killing sprees happened long before firearms existed. Look up the phrase "run amok". It is something humans do.
And then its something other humans do to try to rationalize it, and especially if they can somehow use it as an example to try to further a pre-existing socio-political agenda. But if you don't accept that mass killings of the past were indictments of (fill in the blank: marijuana, rock and roll, video games, anarchy) then you don't get to claim this most recent one is an indictment of "men's rights groups". 
This is not representative of anything, because it is a single isolated and unprecedented instance. A person ran amok. It happens. This particular one hated women. That part is a coincidence. Lots and lots of men hate women and don't go on shooting sprees. The entire thing is a non-issue.

How is it that people miss that the majority of his victims were male?

What an incredibly appropriate analogy, for the "feminist" misogyny I've been trying to point out the past couple years: the belief, even in the face of contrary evidence, that women are inherently victims, that women are weak and helpless and need protection.
You see it in the persistent belief that it is dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night in bad neighborhood - even though statistics say men are at significantly greater risk of attack by stranger.
You see it in the persistent myth of date rape drugs - even though 99% of suspected roofies turn out to be nothing but self-inflicted alcohol ingestion.
You see it in the extremely different reactions (and sometimes even laws) in sex with a minor depending on which gender was the older and which the younger.
You see it in rape laws (and statistic gathering) that defines the word rape as "penetration", which automatically means a female forcing a male is a lesser (or no) crime.
You see it in claims that "society doesn't value women" - while we ignore that men are expected (and often legally required) to go to war and die for society, while women are not only not forced to, but aren't even allowed to.

And then here, when twice as many men are murdered as women, and we all agree to pretend that it exemplifies violence against women. Um, huh?

I'm not denying that sexism or oppression exists. But the trope of woman as victim is not at all helpful in countering them. In fact, it is deeply counter-productive.
You want to end rape? Fuck giving the power to perpetrators, with the slogan "no means no". How about "fight back!" as a slogan? The overwhelming majority of attempted rapes where the intended victim fights back with maximum violence, the rape does not occur. But most don't fight back, because women are taught all their lives that they are weak and defenseless, that they are naturally victims.
It's bullshit. 

Healthcare: the last mainstream superstition

Question:

Have you ever taken a drug that you know for sure works, because you could feel the difference it made?

Unless you happen to be both a pharmaceutical researcher and a theoretical psychologist, you almost definitely answered "yes" to that question.

You thought back to pain pills you've taken, allergy medication, cold remedies, a round of antibiotics, and you experienced the change, you felt it working.  At least, you believe you felt it.

But you are mistaken.  Even if you really did feel something, it is not remotely near enough for you to use the phrase "know for sure".

It simply isn't humanly possible.

There are literally hundreds of steps that could introduce error into the process, from the complexity of biology, to the limitations of awareness, perception, and memory, from the placebo effect and the power of expectation, to dozens of cognitive biases and ways that the human mind is predictably irrational.

If you have been reading my blog a while, you have likely seen all of those links before, but if not - or if you never actually clicked on them and watched or read what they link to - it would be worth while to check them out - especially if you're one of those sort of people who has a body.  If you have ever been to a doctor, taken any form of medicine, ever been sick, ever been injured, or if there is any chance you might ever do any of those things in the future, it would be to your great benefit to read and understand the information at all of those links.

Unless you have read those, everything I write next will be a lot easier to write off and disregard, but for those who have seen them before, I don't want to be too repetitive.
So go click some links, spend a few hours learning, come back and read this here post some other time...

...

Oh, hi!
You're back I see.  That's some crazy stuff, right?  I'm totally not over it yet either.  But hey, this is the world we live in, we gotta work with what we got.

For some reason that I have never even heard a good theory on, American's are apparently far more prone to believing crazy stuff than most of the rest of the developed world.  We have a disproportionate amount of creationists, astrologists, people who believe in ghosts and ESP and faith healing and magnet healing, and "energy fields", people who deny global warming and embrace supply side economics, people who are opposed to vaccines and any form of genetic engineering.

The proportion of people who buy into any one of those examples, however, is less than half - anti-science ignorance is widespread, but it isn't quite mainstream.

There is one area though, where being anti-science is so prevalent that an entire industry is built up around it, and that's health care.

We have the term "alternative medicine".  That's a thing.

What is it an alternative to?  Well... any medicine which has independently and objectively been shown to be effective at treating whatever it is it claims to treat.
Because the term for something which actually works is just "medicine".

No other area of life has an equivalent.

There is no "alternative math", where people base calculations on numerology.
There isn't an "alternative chemistry" industry, which seeks to revive the forgotten wisdom of alchemy.

There is also not many other ways where going backwards is seen as a good thing.  Few people cook over a log fire instead of using natural gas or electricity, based on the fact that people cooked over open fires for thousands of years and therefor it must be better. Other than Richie Norris, no one suggests we should go back to living in teepees. Nobody is seriously advocating we replace telephones with smoke signals or email with pony express riders for long-distance communication.
Health care is the one area where a very significant portion of the population sees ignoring all the progress science has made in understanding how things work as being a good thing.

Of course no one consciously thinks of it that way.  The term is "traditional", not "obsolete".  The reasoning is that people did things a certain way for a really long time, therefor it must be valid.  Presumably if it didn't work people would have given it up by now. 

But we are selective in which invalidated treatments we keep.  Pretty much no one advocates bloodletting, but there are many who take sticking needles in the skin as a serious form of health care.  We are done with trepanation, but you can get health insurance to pay for vertebral subluxation treatments.  Few people think exorcism will cure anything, but, somehow, homeopathy still exists - its silly to even investigate it, because its just water.  There is literally no active ingredient in most homeopathic remedies.   Belief in the four humors is past tense, but there is no challenge in finding people who believe in mysterious "energy fields" around living things.

Don't get me wrong - there really are energy fields.  But they aren't mysterious.  Humans have figured this stuff out.  There are 4 types of force in the universe: 2 types of nuclear force, gravity, and electromagnetism. We all know how gravity works - heavy stuff pulls toward other heavy stuff.  In our daily experience the planet is by far the heaviest thing around, so that means everything gets pulled toward Earth.  Nuclear forces keep all matter together, but we really only interact with it in bombs and power plants.  That leaves electromagnetism, which is fully understood by science, but isn't quite common knowledge yet.

Brief digression for a general science lesson:

Almost everything we commonly think of as "energy" is some form of electromagnatism.  Electricity, obviously.  And magnets.  The entire planet is covered in a giant magnet field, which is why compasses point North.  You can actually see it at the poles, in the form of the Northern (and Southern) Lights

If you can remember back to high school science class, you may realize the close relationship between electricity and magnets: wrap a live wire around a piece of iron, you have an electromagnet.  Move a magnet back and forth inside of a coil of wire, it generates electricity.  That relationship is how every electric generator and every electric motor works.
Then there are electromagnetic waves.  Sounds fancy and sciency, right?  Its just the technical term for "light".  It's all light waves.  Like, the stuff you can see with your eyes, blue and purple and green.
All the different colors of light are arranged in order of how big the light wave is: purple has a small light wave, red has a big one.  That's why rainbows in the sky are in the order they are in.  You can't see it, but the rainbow keeps going, in both directions.  Above purple is ultraviolet (Latin, for "above violet" - hey, what do ya know about that!).  We can't see it with our eyes, but it is there.  If you happened to be a bee, you would see it.  Below red is infrared ("below red") light.  Again, our eyes can't see it, but it is there.  If you put a thermometer just below the red light coming off of a prism, you will see it gets hotter as you go down from purple toward red, and gets even hotter just below red.  Infrared light is where heat lamps get their heat, and it's what night vision goggles see.

But it doesn't stop there.
Microwaves, TV and radio signals, cell phone signals, x-rays, WI FI, radar, it is all light.  A microwave is just a color.  One which the human eye can't see, but the only difference between microwaves and blue is the size of the wave.  All an antenna is is a mechanical eyeball.  A radio sees radiowaves just like your eye sees green.

Even if you personally don't fully understand all the details, realize that it isn't a mystery, all this is very well understood.  It isn't even all that complex.  We know how energy works.  If there is a "life force", it is within the forces that exist in the universe.  And in fact, our nervous system runs on electricity.  Our thoughts, our movements, every part of being alive, it is all powered by chemical energy, adenosine triphosphate breaking down to adenosine diphosphate, and releasing electrically charged ions that can do work in the process.  If you click that last link and try to read it, unless you happen to have been a molecular biology major, chances are most of it is hard to follow.  The important thing to realize is that, as insanely complex as living things are, we have an amazingly high amount of this stuff figured out.

Very few of us fully understand all the details of electronics and computers, down to both the resistor, capacitor and transistor level of the hardware and the line by line code of the software, but we all accept that it is understood, that it works, and we don't reject laptops and cellphones in favor of mysticism, ancient or modern, eastern or western. 

So I was wondering, why do we reject everything biology has learned in favor of tradition?  Why, when science understands biology so well, does such a huge proportion of the population choose to deliberately seek out health care practices and practitioners which explicitly reject the most basic principal of science: "check that you're right"?

I have a few theories.

I suspect the theories are all right, to one degree or another, and they all work together and reinforce each other.

-As complex as computers and airplanes and GPS and every other area of technology is, as complex as meteorology and geology and astronomy are, all of it pales in comparison to molecular biology.

Take this example:

That is fucking mind blowing!  I can barely keep up, but it is... how do you even put it into words?  All those things are going on inside of your body, right now.  And it's just one tiny set of many examples of cellular processes.  There are thousands more like it, and some set of those thousands are happening in every one of your 100 trillion cells 24 hours a day, from conception until several minutes after death.

It is totally overwhelming.

Wouldn't it be nice if it could all be simplified to something a person can wrap their mind around, like "life force", or "positive energy" or "qi"?  Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of having to understand all that amazingly wonderful reality, all health could just be a function of, say, eating the right things or of spinal alignment?

We tend to think of the body like a complicated machine.  When a machine breaks, there is always some specific part that needs fixing or replacing - make the right adjustment, everything is as it should be.

But living things are really nothing at all like machines.  Metabolism is not like burning fuel.  Our joints are not hinges or pivots.  We are more like a bag of soup.  A bag of soup with a frame - but the joints of the frame, instead of being held together by pins, they are held together by strong rubber bands and cushioned by mushy padding.  We are more like a wobbly marionette than a rigid robot.

If the human body is essentially a big chemical bag of soup, and our skeleton is held together by stretchy bendy tendons and ligaments, that rather undermines the entire concept of body "alignment".  What exactly is it being aligned with, and what stops it from lining up "right" on its own?  This doesn't just undermine chiropracty - it undermines most of medical massage, orthopaedic surgery, sports physiology, and physical therapy.

The idea that manipulating body parts, putting them in the "correct" position, stems from thinking of the body as mechanical, when in fact it is fluid and flexible and far more complex than any machine ever built.

Another possible reason for the popularity of anti-science in healthcare, besides for being far more complex than any other area of potential human knowledge, biology and medicine is far more personal.  Nobody is ever going to interact with a neutrino.  Understanding the Higgs Boson doesn't affect your daily life in anyway.  So it's fairly easy to accept that some other people, for whom that is their specialty, know what that stuff is, and you can just trust them on it.  Since everyone has a body, and the health of it is arguably the single most important thing in your life, everyone has incentive to want to know what the hell is going on.

 An answer - any answer - always feels better than "I don't know".  It just feels terrible to have a vague ambiguous open-ended question; especially if its something with a real effect on day to day life, like a disability, illness, or pain.

And an answer we can't comprehend sometimes feels as bad as no answer at all.  

It is an unfortunate side effect of how human psychology works that we feel better having a concrete - but wrong - answer than having one that is accurate, but confusing.

And compounding that, the complexity of molecular biology is so great that, even as much as scientists do know, there is still a huge amount they don't - so in addition to the real answers being confusing, sometimes nobody has an answer at all.

If 10 doctors and specialists say "we don't know", and then one seems confident that they have the answer, we are inclined to accept that last answer, even if we might not have otherwise, because there is nothing better being offered.  But sometimes "nobody really knows" is the most honest answer.  When things are really complex and/or controversial, a professional's confidence should make you less trusting of their opinion, not more.  That confidence is coming from faith.  Faith is the antithesis of science.  It means just making something up, and deciding it's right, without doing the work to double check.

Very closely related to the last reason, it always feel better to do something than to do nothing.  People say that explicitly in times of desperation: "I can't just sit back and do nothing".  But sometimes nothing anyone does will help.  Sometimes doing anything makes it worse.  In the game of soccer, when one team kicks a penalty shot, the statistics say that the goalie has the best chance of blocking the ball if he just stays in the center.  The kick is so fast it is humanly impossible to predict which way it will go.  But almost every goalie, every time, will dive either left or right, and game after game, the kicker scores a goal as the goalie dives out of the way, just because he felt he had to DO something. Because if he just stood there, he would feel like an idiot.

But the truth is: 

Living things have been figuring out how to exist for 3 billion years.  

Without any form of medicine.  

Not modern science based, not alternative tradition based.  

Not any kind.  

Any living thing that hasn't figured out how to heal itself, how to naturally be in optimal alignment, how to get the correct nutrients via appetite, repair its own damage, and generally optimize its own health, went extinct long before humans existed.

Every single day, even without injury or illness, your body creates 300 billion new cells, to replace old worn out ones.  You may have heard the claim that the entire body is replaced every 7-10 years.  It isn't exactly right - different body parts renew at different rates.  Some take 16 years.  Some are replaced every few days.  But, aside from brain cells, your entire body really does replace itself on an ongoing basis.

This is how you heal after injury.  Give the body enough time, and it will replace damaged cells, without you doing anything at all.
Our immune system is more powerful and effective than any drug or remedy humans have ever invented - in fact, the single biggest medical innovation of all time - the vaccine - isn't actually a medicine at all, it is just a way to teach the body's natural immune system how to do its job a little better.

Certainly if you have cancer, or a severe bacterial infection, a compound fracture, diabetes or appendicitis, modern health care can mean the difference between loss of life or limb, and a full recovery.  But for the vast majority of ailments, both physical injury and pathogen, the best possible thing you can do is support your own general health: stay physically fit (balance intense exercise with sufficient rest and recovery), get enough nutrients and calories (but not too many calories), get enough sleep (every night!), and keep emotional stress to a minimum (which, believe it or not, has very little to do with your life circumstances.  It is almost entirely about your outlook).
These four lifestyle choices: exercise, nutrition, sleep, and optimism, correlate far more strongly to overall health than access to any particular form of health care or treatment, more even than access to any form of healthcare at all.

Because of the evolutionary process, because of living cell's incredible ability to repair damage to itself and destroy infections,

Almost every medical problem will heal itself, all on its own.


 With no treatment, just time and nutrition and rest.

And that means that if you take or do any form of "treatment" long enough, it will seem like it "worked", just because your body was repairing itself all along, and you happened to be doing this other stuff at the same time. You end up better, so everyone assumes they got better because of the treatment.  But you probably would have gotten better anyway.  

That is without even considering the placebo effect.

The human body generally fights off a cold in barely over a week, with no drugs or remedy of any kind.

Say you start feeling symptoms a day or two after you first catch it, the next day you start taking a remedy, and then a couple days later the cold is mostly subsided.  People will almost universally assume that the remedy cured the cold, but it didn't do anything.  There is no substance that can reduce the length of a cold. Anything which reduces symptoms (like a fever reducer) will increase the length of the cold, because the medicine isn't fighting the virus, it is fighting your body's natural response to the virus.

But as a single individual there is no way for you to test taking the remedy and not taking it side-by-side to see which gets you better faster.  You have to either take it or not take it.

This is the whole reason clinical trials and studies were invented in the first place. 

And then people figured out that just being in the trial made people get better, because of the placebo effect, and they had to introduce the double blind placebo trial.

Placebos genuinely make people feel better - and that has much more significance than you realize.  It affects you more than you ever realized, and more than you want to admit.  This is why you got my first question, in the opening line to this essay, wrong. You can not know a medicine, or any medical procedure is working because you "feel" it working, because there is no possible way you can control for the placebo effect in your own personal first hand experience. 

It is not humanly possible for anyone to answer "yes" to that question and be right. Read about it at the link below:

Investigation into the placebo effect

I know, you already know about placebos.
Remember that question I opened this blog post with?

"Have you ever taken a drug that you know for sure works, because you could feel the difference it made?"

If you answered "yes" to that question (and admit it, you did), then you don't really understand the significance of the placebo effect.  You may understand, intellectually, that it happens, but there is a disconnect, a cognitive dissonance, where you think you are an exception.  You think you can feel the difference a drug or physical therapy makes objectively. Placebos seem like a fascinating phenomenon that affects other people.  Millions and millions of other people.

Even if you accept that, for example, you don't always know all of your subconscious motivations for your behavior, everyone thinks they can "know" their own body objectively.

But believing that is just as ridiculous as thinking you can "tell" from the moment of conception that you are pregnant (it takes between one and two weeks for the egg to implant, so there is no change to feel before then), or that you can "feel" when somebody is looking at you, (you can't).

You, my dear reader, are a human.  You have all the limitations that all humans have.

There is so much more to the placebo effect than we normally think about.  The placebo effect is deep.  Fascinating.  And extremely important, extremely relevant to daily life as living creatures.  I would highly recommend reading  some more about it - for example this and this and this.  It should be required for any person who has a body.

You would think every single medical professional, in any field, would know this stuff, but the unfortunate reality is that doctors aren't remotely scientists in any sense of the word.  Not just the "alternative" folk, but regular, med school graduating, AMA member, licensed professional doctors.  They are largely guessing.  They don't keep up on research.  They get influenced by the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, and by what school they happened to go to and what their co-workers happen to beileve:

http://www.utne.com/science-and-technology/a-study-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away.aspx

Read it.  It's scary stuff. You should not trust your doctor.  Doctors are just people, and they make all the same normal mistakes that all humans make.  Question them.  Get a second opinion, from a doctor in a totally different field.  Get a third opinion.  Take advantage of the age of the internet and do some research on your own.  Try to prove them wrong, even if you suspect they are right.  Every good scientist sets out to prove her own hypothesis wrong before publishing, because it's in searching for contrary data that confirmation bias is undermined.  Its easy to find what you are looking for, but finding what you are looking for is poor evidence that you are actually right.  Search for what you aren't looking for.

We tend to assume, maybe because of all the training they get, maybe because of the white coats, that doctors are like scientists for health, but they aren't.

If a molecular biologist is like an engineer, a doctor is like a mechanic.
The engineer designs brand new inventions, and to do that they have to have extensive understanding of materials science, newtonian physics, mechanics, and advanced mathematics.  The mechanic only needs to understand enough mechanics to figure out how the thing the engineer designed is supposed to work, in order to fix it when it breaks.  It is an important job (its MY job!), but you shouldn't assume a mechanic understands all of the how and why of which materials were chosen or why they were put together just so.  

Similarly, while science at large has figured out a myriad of metabolic pathways, enzymatic processes, and all of the other stuff going on behind the scenes within the human body, doctors tend to only scratch the surface enough to diagnose a few particular problems, and suggest possible ways to help correct them.

A doctor is a mechanic for the body.

Like mechanics, they often seem to believe they know more than they really do, diagnose based on "intuition", and frequently stray from their specialty (or are quick to see every illness as somehow related to their particular specialty).  Given how complex life is, any doctor who finds a simple cause and effect relationship should be at least a little suspect. Given how much there is left for science to learn about how everything works, the more confident a doctor is, the less you should trust them.  Think of them more like weather forecasters - they have more training and equipment than you, so they can give you a better prediction than you can make by guessing, but everything they say has a percentage likelihood of being wrong.  The best doctors know this, and they will be upfront with you about it.  Never discount a medical professional for saying "I don't know".  That is usually the most honest possible answer, and when it comes to your health, an ambiguous truth will at least not do as much damage as a confident mistake can.

All that stuff makes people turn away from modern medicine, and to "alternative" medicine, but that's even worse.  Much much worse.  By definition, alternative medicine is anything which has been already proven in tests to NOT work.

People are drawn to the easy answers, to the alternative health care provider's sense of certainty, to their rejection of "artificial" pharmaceuticals in favor of "natural" treatments - never mind that drugs are derived of naturally occurring compounds, that plenty of herbs are bad for you or even deadly, that cooking food is a process of chemistry, or that the animal body is the biggest, most complex chemical factory that has ever existed.

Some people suggest never eating anything with an ingredient list you don't recognize and can't pronounce.
You want to see a list of scary looking chemicals?

• oligosaccharides
  pantothenic acid
  selenium
  manganese
  lipoprotein lipase
  inactivated alkaline phosphatase
  lactoperoxidase
  C16:0 ß-hydroxy fatty acids
  conjugated linoleic acid*
  phosphorus
  α-lactalbumin
  blood serum albumin
  transferrin
  high proline micelle
  methionine
  cholin
  galactose
  cerebrosides

Gross, huh?  You would never want to eat that weird crap.  Probably something Pfizer created, or Monsanto maybe.

Nope.

Those are all chemicals that are naturally present in milk.

*(which is a TRANSfat omg!!!!!!!! - but wait, aren't transfats all man-made and added by the evil food industry????  What's that?  Some transfats are naturally occurring? How can that be, when everything natural is good and healthy, and all transfats are created by evil corporations??)

Chemicals.
A chemical is anything that is made of matter.  In other words, everything.  Everything you eat and drink is made of chemicals.  You are made of chemicals.  Everything you can see or touch or smell is made of chemicals. Nothing exists that isn't chemicals.  This is not just semantics.  When ever anyone says anything about "chemicals" meaning something "unnatural" or toxic or synthetic or whatever, its coming from ignorance of science.

What is the real difference between a drug made in a factory by a pharmaceutical company and an "all natural" remedy? There are laws requiring the drug company to extensively test their product for effectiveness and side-effects before they are allowed to sell it, while anything not officially classified as a drug has no regulations and  no testing standards.

So far I've listed a bunch of reasons why people might be even more prone to accept superstition in the realm of health care than any other area, but I have found, when discussing this with people in the past, that people are particularly resistant to hearing contradictory evidence to their medical treatments, not just intellectually, but emotionally.

I think, beyond just the normal ways the human mind is always irrational, there are a couple other specific reasons why this is a sticky one:

 - Personal relationships.
This seems to be one of the biggest reasons that alternative medicine is still so popular, despite being proven not to work over and over again.  Its not just that everyone is superstitious.  It's that mainstream medicine has been so totally enveloped by capitalism that doctors don't have time to treat their patients like people.  Which makes people prefer to gravitate to those who actually do treat them like people. 
Compounded by the fact that such a huge amount of physical illness really is closely tied in with the mental and emotional (up to 90% of all doctor visits are for "conditions" caused by stress); sometimes the alternative practitioner really does get better results - just not because of their actual treatments. 
The results are  despite the treatments; they are because of the emotional connection they build with the patient.  

So, of course, when someone challenges the validity of the alternative "treatment", the patient will naturally immediately feel this is an attack on their own personal doctor.  Their own personal doctor is a good person!  S/he is honest and caring and hard working, s/he has a real medical degree and 3 decades of experience and has helped 1000s of people! 
Questioning their belief is seen as a character attack. Even though the same person might dispute a particular religion even while they have close personal friends or relatives who hold that religion, or dispute an economic theory without feeling it is an attack on all who believe it.

It is not a statement on the integrity of any individual.  Doctors are human.  Humans make mistakes. Alternative medicine practitioners believe wholeheartedly, they get invested in their own mistakes and suffer confirmation bias and the backfire effect and all the rest.  That doesn't make them bad people.  It doesn't make them all con men and tricksters.  Most, certainly the vast majority, are totally sincere.  Just like the billions of people who believe in a particular religion, the strength of conviction doesn't mean they are right.

 - People always hate to be mistaken, but they especially feel bad about it if they have spent significant time or money, investing in something that turns out to be wrong.
Nobody likes to feel stupid, and we especially hate feeling like suckers.  So, instead of correcting the view later once we have more information, we usually ignore the new information, or look for a way to justify the old belief.

 - If it feels like it's working, then most people feel it's safer to just keep doing it than to stop, and risk relapse.
If you read some of the links on placebo, there are lots of examples of people asking to continue their treatment even after they are told it was fake!  They KNEW the drug wasn't helping, but they were afraid to change the conditions that led to feeling better.  It's an extreme example of the natural human faulty reasoning of post hoc ergo prompter hoc which is the basis of almost all forms of superstition.  If humans do that even when they know for sure the drug was a fake, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that people will cling to treatments that, as far as they know, might actually be working - even if that "might" is just based on not knowing enough biology and related science to objectively evaluate it.

Between the fact that the body heals itself regardless of what we do the vast majority of the time, and the fact that the placebo effect makes us feel better if we do or take anything that we are told will help, it is no wonder that every form of alternative healing seems to work to those who seek it out.

The treatments always seem to "work" in that the person gets better - or, at least, feels better temporarily.

Of course, there is a huge difference between feeling better for a little while, and actually getting better.  
This is when it really gets me - when the "treatment" isn't even supposedly a cure, when the "treatment" is supposed to continue indefinitely.   I have no numbers to back this up, so maybe I'm wrong, but from personal observation, alternative health care providers seem to much more frequently prescribe "treatments" to patients which are supposed to be regular, and for a lifetime.

I think most of the medical folk who prescribe such things are sincere, but it is certainly convenient that their cures require a lifelong prescription - and the accompanying lifetime of payments.

This seems to be particularly prevalent among the various structuralists, and in particular following any large - but one-time - injury.  Remember when I pointed out that the entire body renews itself regularly?  Different bones heal at different rates, anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months. Torn muscles, tendons, and ligaments, heal within 2 months, and even the most severe damage, that requiring surgery to reattach something torn all the way through, heals within 4 months.  If a person is being treated for an injury that occurred years ago, they really aren't being treated for that injury at all.  That injury has long since healed on its own.

Its important to keep in mind - even with a scientifically validated drug or surgery or other procedure, nothing that medical care can do can actually heal you.  Only the body can do that.  The best treatments serve to facilitate that healing, to remove any obstacles to healing.  Health is the body's default natural state.

I am beginning to suspect that in a lot of these cases the "cure" itself is actually prolonging the problem.

Sometimes this is by interfering with the body's natural self-healing. Sometimes they may make things worse by direct action - unintended drug interactions and side effects, or physical therapies that damage tissues.

In some cases the treatment may prolong injury in the same way that cold remedies do: they make the patient feel better (temporarily), and with their pain masked, they don't rest as much as they need to in order to allow the body to heal.  Contrariwise, oftentimes a person will be told to avoid use of a body part for so long that the muscles and tendons get weak and inflexible, which in turn makes them more prone to future injury.
The most obvious example of this is back injuries.  Someone who has ever strained their back tries to avoid ever doing anything that might stress it, and consequently the muscles bones tendons and ligaments of the lower core atrophy and get weaker and weaker, to the point where they are at much higher risk of injury than they would have been if they had taken the opposite approach, and engaged in a (careful, gradual) consistent program of progressive-load weight-bearing resistance training, and higher risk even then if they had just maintained normal everyday activities.


Most of the time the treatment itself is probably neutral, but the false diagnoses produces a "nocebo effect". They tell you something is wrong with you, they tell you to expect certain symptoms (unless you let them heal you), and you experience what you are expecting. They tell you the symptoms will recur within a certain amount of time, and because you are expecting it, you feel it. The nocebo effect is equally as strong as the placebo effect. You may recall from some of the links above how being told to expect certain negative side effects caused them intensely in patients of both fake drugs and fake acupuncture.

Anytime a health care provider tells you that the problem is something fundamentally wrong with you, or a natural tendency to go out of alignment, out of balance, to absorb negative energy, to build up toxins that need cleansing, whatever it is, the fact of having been told that will make you far more prone to feeling negative symptoms in the future - or to interpret minor unrelated things as being that sign you were waiting for - and that feels like it validates what you were told, and justifies giving them some more money (and time) to let them "heal" you.

I don't think the practitioner does this deliberately, any more than bloodletters and other dark age doctors who killed more of their patients than they helped did it deliberately.   But as a patient, we all owe it to ourselves not to put blind faith in an industry or ideology which has gotten so much wrong all throughout history, and whose track record even today is - debatable. At best.

I'm not trying to tell anyone else what to do or think or believe. 

I just feel a responsibility to share information I have had the privilege of having access to.

I can say, for myself, that I once was a fan of alternative medicine myself, but today I am skeptical of all forms of medicine. Before I take any medical advice, I need to know for myself the clinical trials that have been involved, the efficacy rate, the side-effects and complications, I need some references to independent research, (independent of anyone who is in anyway in the profit chain), and perhaps most of all, I have to understand the process, the cause and effect - how it works, and why.  Lucky for me - for all of us - we happen to live in an age where all of this information is available, for free, from the comfort of home.  For something which has such a profound impact on quality of life, it should be worth a few hours of research.

I think understanding the world at all requires a healthy level of skepticism, but most especially when it comes to health care.  For one thing, the stakes are particularly high.  For another, throughout the history of civilization, medical practice has gotten things wrong much more often than it has gotten them right.
Look at the 4 humors, or bloodletting, or leeches, exorcisms, lobotomies, and the hundreds of downright silly superstitions that nearly every culture has had at some point - so much stuff that we look back on now and think "what in the hell could those people possibly have been thinking?"

And yet, we are so filled with hubris that we never stop to think how, 100 years from now people will look back on us today and think the same thing.

You trust yourself WAY too much

Think about all the stuff you know, on all the millions of topics there are to know stuff about - numbers, names, relationships, science, history, skills, where you left your keys...
Now think about how many times in your life you have been mistaken about something you had been pretty sure of.

Of all the stuff you "know" right now, a fair percentage of it is wrong.

For some strange reason, nobody seems to notice this, and everyone goes on being sure about all manner of things - frequently including things that there is no possible way they could know for sure.

We (humans) have figured out a fair bit about our own minds.
Our awareness, perception, and recall are all very, very bad; yet we almost all almost always remain confident that our own perception accurately portrays the world outside our heads, that our memories accurately reflect what actually happened.

But you don't have to take my word for it.


The following 3 documentaries are really fun. They are interactive - if you have any doubt about your own limitations, if you don't doubt your self as much as you should - these videos should cure you of that, and grant you some humility.
And they do it in a totally entertaining way.

Watch 'em!!!

(Embedding isn't working, blogger won't upload, and Nat Geo won't allow it on youtube, so you will have to click on the links to watch)

  National Geographic: Test Your Brain Episode 1 - Pay Attention

  National Geographic: Test Your Brain Episode 2 - Perception

  National Geographic: Test Your Brain Episode 3 - Memory



No, I'm serious, click, watch.



Its free!
They are each 45 minutes long, but what you learn from it will make your life better forever.
They will help you make smarter decisions.

And aside from all that, it's filled with tricky games and puzzles, magic tricks (which they then explain) and tests, and if you don't enjoy it, I offer you a rock solid no-questions-asked, double-your-money-back-guarantee.

If you make it to the 5 minute mark without getting sucked in, well... I just don't know what's wrong with you.

 You may not have an entire 2 and a half hours right now, but do come back and watch the other two as soon as you have a chance to give it your undivided attention.

 And when you finish, take some time to reflect on what it all implies.



Its fun and interesting, but it is really one of the most profound realizations a human can have, to fully internalize this information, to accept how this affects us literally every day, to acknowledge what it implies about everything we think we know.

 As all the games and puzzles in the 3 videos showed you - you, reading these words right now - are not an exception.

 It isn't just some interesting psychological study, weird guys in labs coats doing stuff to dogs and rats which is ethically questionable, or surveys with tricky worded questions taken by college kids.

 This stuff affects you every second of every day, every piece of information you take in is processed by the same brain that failed all the tests in these documentaries.
 Which means you should always be aware that what you remember is not necessarily what actually happened, you should know there was always something going on that you missed, know that every single experience is subject to misperception, and you should question the stuff you are confident about just as much as you question those who disagree with you.

 This is not to say you can never know anything with confidence. It just means that personal experience should not outweigh better evidence. Maybe you saw something that looked like a ghost once, but given how imperfect our awareness, perception, and memory is, the more objective evidence against it should outweigh your personal experience.

Get over your ego.

You aren't always right.

 Even things you are 100% certain about, sometimes turn out to be wrong.

 Maybe you should be 100% certain less often.

This isn't an insult to you personally, it is just the nature of the human brain. We weren't optimized for our modern world, nor, for that matter, for understanding the world and getting to underlying truth's. We were optimized for survival on the savanna, and sometimes superstition leads to better chances at survival than careful objective analysis. Our world today is a million times more complex than eat or be eaten though, so it is in our own best interests to learn what our brain's limitations are, so that we can learn to compensate for them.

So, who do we trust, if we can't even trust our own senses? Not somebody else, that's for sure. Somebody else makes all the exact same mistakes as we make, but with the added disadvantage that they haven't seen those videos, they haven't been to the You Are Not So Smart blog or heard the podcast

   

and so their misinformed opinions don't even have the chance to compensate for the human mind's natural errors, because they aren't aware of them.

Enter Science!

Science is not guys in lab coats with fancy degrees and expensive equipment.
Science is just a method for checking if a particular idea is right or not, as objectively as possible.
Its a way to compensate for all the limitations of the brain that those documentaries I linked to just taught us about.
No one person can make a scientific proclamation and have it actually be science - it is crowd sourced, anyone can check, even up to and including you, whether the things it suggests actually pan out under testing and double testing. That's what makes it more reliable than personal experience, or even the collected opinions of thousands of people.

But I won't go into that in too much detail, because I already have, quite extensively, here:

  Science!


  http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2013/05/science.html

Not a great start to the new year / new life

Lets see...

After almost 2 months of trying to sell my RV trailer with no success, I finally found not one, but at least 2 serious buyers who had the cash and wanted to buy within the week.
Then I got about 7 calls and emails of other people interested in seeing it (after I listed it for $500 more than the first two were expecting), and I was considering if I should try to get the best price or just get it sold and over with.

And so, of course, that's when it gets stolen.

Its 35ft long, 15ft tall, 8ft wide, and 7500lbs.  It requires a 3/4-ton truck and a class IV hitch at a minimum to move.  It had a solid hitch lock on it.
Someone, some how, hooked it up in the middle of the night and took off.  Several witnesses (people interested in buying, and the police, who were about to ticket it for being in one place too long) saw it one afternoon, I went to move it the next morning, gone.





My building's janitor died suddenly and unexpectedly.  He had some ongoing health problems, but they seemed mostly controlled.  There may have been some drug use other than the prescribed kind, its not that clear.
It sucks, because, as he did clean ups for the building and I did repairs, we ended up working together fairly often, and I got to know him better than anyone of my other neighbors.  He was a good guy.  I last talked to him a day or two before he passed out on the street and was hospitalized.  I haven't known many people personally who have died.  A neighbor who I barely spoke to once, my grandmother who I met a couple times and talked to on the phone sometimes.  The closest to me was my brother.  When that happened I was living in a different state, and I hadn't interacted with him for at least a year, and only sporadically for a few years before then.  Of course I knew him much better, was closer to him, but in one sense the distance meant it didn't feel as real and immediate as this time, when it was someone I had seen and spoken to just days before.

That is sad and unfortunate in its own right of course. On top of that, it means I am now responsible for the stuff he used to do.  And it turns out he was going above and beyond, cleaning up after some extremely lazy and irresponsible neighbors.  Several households here apparently can't be bothered to carry their own trash all the way down one or two flights of stairs to put it in the dumpster.  When our janitor died, bags of garbage almost immediately started piling up on the stairs and landings and balconies behind the building.
Followed closely, of course, by the more civilized tenants calling me to complain about the garbage.
The culture of poverty is very disheartening.



There was a tense and uncomfortable interaction with my recent girlfriend, who I am still friends with, still work with, and who didn't want to break up.  I was trying to avoid hurting her, but the way the timing worked out, the attempt itself caused some hurt.  Having been on both sides of that now, its hard to say which feels worse - being the one who is left, or the one who does the leaving.  They both suck.  In different ways, but both a lot.  I really really hate hurting or disappointing people.  Especially people I care about.



Of course, as I mentioned in my last post, I ended a brief fling.  Or rather, I should say, she ended it.  So that hurt a bit.  Not terribly, but the timing wasn't great.  The worst of it lasted about a day and a half, maybe 2 days.  Then I reconnected with two other women I was beginning to get to know before I got distracted by her, and that helped me regain some perspective and clear my mind, and more importantly clear my heart.




Then I started a huge work project with my recent-ex / current friend.  It involved moving a large amount of concrete up a steep incline, about 4 stories worth of steep driveways and rock stairs and dirt paths, to where we will build a giant chicken coop and fully enclosed run.  1000lbs worth.  My back was sore for days afterward, so much it was hard to get up out of a chair or walk around. 
Ok, ok - all the rest of these have been emotional hurt, and this was just physical.
But it added to the stress non-the-less.




I failed my advancement test to move to a higher rank in the Coast Guard for a 2nd time.
From those who I've talked to, most fail it a few times.  Its kind of a stupid test - lots of esoteric numbers to memorize that you would just look up in a reference manual in real life, and very little practical stuff on how to actually run and maintain the systems.  In fact, the entire thing is being completely re-done.  Sometime in the next year.  So, probably after I finally pass the current one.  Oh well.



I haven't been working nearly as much as I'd like to.  This year the slow economy finally caught up to my business.  I haven't had to dip into savings, but I keep looking at my retirement fund each month, and it is just flat-lining.  Each month I am more and more behind on my long-term goals.  I am already behind, because I didn't even start trying to save until I was 30 years old.  And I really like to at least partially retire early, while I still have the health and strength to fully enjoy it and appreciate it.  I could be volunteering and taking classes and writing and who knows, maybe even traveling the world by bike!  But 40 grand is not going to last the rest of my life...
In my reluctance to move any money from savings to pay for daily life, I actually bounced a check!  Haven't done that in many many many years. 
Selling the RV would have been really nice.
At least it was insured, so maybe I'll recover something...



And now the most recent addition to this string of unfortunate events:



The woman I recently stopped dating has for some reason gotten the idea that every number she receives from a blocked or unknown number is actually me, calling to harass her, or, I don't know, beg her back, or something, I really don't know.
She doesn't just suspect this, she "KNOWS" it.  She sent me an angry email to leave her alone, and she said not to bother to deny I'm calling over and over, because she "knows" its really me, and nothing I say will make any difference.

What makes this not just paranoid, but a little insane, is that she said that the person calling ("me") is leaving messages.  Which means all she would need to do to find out who is actually calling is just listen to one of the messages!!!!  That would answer it, with actual absolute certainty.  But she thinks she doesn't have to listen to it, because her intuition tells her that its me.

This would be why I always argue against intuition so strongly. 
The strength of the feeling behind it does not make it any more likely to actually be correct. 

Here is someone who has faith in her intuition that I would call and harass her for weeks after we stopped talking no less strong than other people have faith in God, when in fact I haven't called her ever.  Even when we were still dating!  Her phone has a broken speaker, so we always connected by chat or text.  She stopped talking to me during a chat mid-conversation, and I gave up.  I moved on, I scheduled dates with other people (people who I have a much higher OKCupid match % with anyway!  In fact, my number 1 and 2 highest matches in my area.  So its not been all bad news recently), I was living my own life, totally unaware that somewhere else in the world someone was experiencing an imaginary version of me tormenting her.

I don't know exactly why this bothers me so much.

Maybe because I told her so much about myself, my thoughts and feelings and fears and dreams, because I was totally honest and held nothing back, and this is apparently the impression she got from all that: that I am a likely stalker.

Why should I care what this one random person who I will never have to interact with ever again thinks?

I know, intellectually, that this has nothing to do with me.  It has to do with her having had a crappy life where many of the people she was close to, family, long term partner, turned out to not be trustworthy or caring people. Her family was anything but supportive during the transition from child to adult years, one of the times many of us need it the most. 
She was manipulated and deceived in a pretty major way by her partner for years and years.  That's a pretty good reason to become cynical and jaded and paranoid, isn't it? 

If you have never gotten close to anyone who is actually honest and straight-forward and isn't trying to take advantage of you, then of course your intuition is going to be confused by me, its going to be trying to figure out what my angle is. 
Its like Kelly said about Darryl:
"Darryl Philbin is the most complicated man that I have ever met. I mean who says exactly what they're thinking? What kinda game is that?"

But on an emotional level, it still hurts.  Obviously making phone calls is not the biggest deal, but it feels like a smaller version of being falsely accused of something like murder or rape. 
Is this really how I come across? 
Why would anyone think that about me? 

And I feel particularly helpless, because there is no possible way I can defend myself.  If I were to say anything to her, like "just listen to the god-damn message! you will see it isn't me", or offer my phone records, or point out that if I wanted to contact her, I would have just sent a text so that she would actually get it, or point out my last blog post that clearly shows I got that it was over back then and was already in the process of moving on - the very fact that I contacted her to communicate one of those messages, it would be contacting her, and that in itself would reinforce the idea that I am trying to contact her!

Its a classic Catch-22!!!!

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just that someone once thought that.  But its present tense.  It is presumably future tense.  Shes still going to get phone calls from "unknown".  Everyone does.  Maybe it's different people each time, and she is just ignoring all of their messages.  Maybe it's telemarketers.  Maybe she really does have a stalker, she just doesn't know who it is! 
Her ex is a drug addict who she is still in contact with, who she had been giving money to even after they broke up, until just recently.  Seems like a pretty likely candidate. And as long as the calls don't stop, she will presumably continue to assume (or rather, "know") that its me. 

Even if she were to eventually discover that future calls weren't me, I have little doubt it wouldn't shake her faith that the past calls really were.  That's how the human mind works - we hate for our versions of reality to be wrong so strongly that we will bend information in whatever way is necessary to fit the pre-written story.


This is perhaps why normal people are guarded around new people they meet that they don't know that well yet.  You never know when a seemingly normal, intelligent person will turn out to actually be mildly insane.

I should have known better.  There were some red-flags that reminded me of my ex-wife, and while she never did this specific thing, it was the sort she would do.  She was frequently convinced that her intuition of my thoughts, feelings, and motives were more accurate and genuine than me actually stating what they were, and she would then respond to her wrong assumptions while ignoring anything I said. 
But of course, I wasn't lying, and I was self-aware, and she was just wrong.  And it caused a lot of (totally unnecessary!) conflict.  A whole lot.  She had the same tendency to assume the worst possible motives for other peoples actions (not just mine).  She had the same extreme difficulty in letting her guard down around others, because she was never really sure anyone was trustworthy.

I think that maybe the biggest part of why this is affecting me so much.  Because it reminds me of my failed marriage.  Because I feel like I didn't learn as much from it as I thought I did.

And because I fear that maybe it says something about me if I am specifically attracted to people who are emotionally unhealthy.  I don't know if that is really true, but there is definitely a part of me that wants to reach out and help people I feel close to.  Its a sort of protective instinct, I think, or just a desire to be helpful, maybe to be needed, I really don't know.  I have the patience and the understanding of how the mind works.  I know I can actually help people get over mental blocks, because I have done it successfully in the past.  Its just that there is one factor that I have no control over.  And it happens to be the biggest one.  The other person has to want to change.  And most people don't.  If they did, most people would have already, on their own, or at least started to. 
You don't go into a relationship thinking "this is a problem, but its one that can be fixed".  Not unless they are saying they know its a problem, and they want to work on it.  Maybe not even then.

But come on.  You can't take a sample size of 2 and call it a pattern.  Yes, there was an element of this in a love interest from very long ago - but that person was actually very receptive to working through her past trauma and learning to trust people, and I like to think I may have actually helped in that process.  And there was no such element at all in my fling with Valerie.  If she had any emotional hang-ups, I never knew about them.  We just got excited about each other, had lots of fun, and realized we weren't compatible as partners.  We tried being friends, but she kept giving me these romantic looks, and she admitted years later it was hard for her to transition to friends after what we had experienced together.  She was healthy.  I fell for her.  So I'm not specifically attracted to people who aren't.

Maybe it bothers me because I didn't see it coming.  At all.  Like, I saw signs that she probably would never be able to completely trust another person, that she thought she knew my internal state better than me.  That she broke it off didn't surprise me.  The fact that she would think I would keep bothering her wasn't even a total shock.

But the part where she is convinced even if I just say "I haven't called you", the part where she is so sure that she doesn't even listen to the message, that caught me completely by surprise.  Refusing to listen means that she WANTS to believe its me.  She doesn't want to be proven wrong.  For some reason, a reason I can't even begin to guess at, her version of reality demands that I be someone completely different than I am.  How would it shake her foundational understanding of reality to find out that I am actually off living my own life, not thinking about her?  Why is that something a person would be desperate to not be proven wrong about?


I always assume the best of everyone.
I always take people at their word, take what they say at face value.
Living here, in this building in East Oakland, I'm beginning to learn that people really do lie.  A lot.  I'm learning to be skeptical of people's words.  I don't like learning that.  I'd rather live my life in blissful ignorance.  I want to believe that other people are sincere.  I want to believe that other people are trying to be good people, that they are trying to understand the world, and that they are doing the best they can given limitations of intelligence and knowledge.  I want to believe that, outside of pick-up artists, salesmen, con-artists, pimps, drug dealers, hypnotists, and politicians, that people are not manipulative.  Real, ordinary people, are not manipulative.  People say what they mean and mean what they say.  Don't they?  Why wouldn't they?  It makes the world a better place.  And people are sane.  Aside from the nutcases and the coo-coo-clock people, the ranting homeless and the institutionalized, people try to see the world as it really is, they don't just see what fits the story they make up inside their heads.  Right?  The guy who does the blog/podcast at YouAreNotSoSmart.com says that this is exactly what basically everybody does.  The only difference between you and I and the guy who thinks he is Jesus is that our stories fit reality a little closer.  But when presented with new information that conflicts with our stories, we reject it, or find a way to rationalize it.  Everyone does that.  That's all she is doing.  Its not about me.  Its that, just like my story says nobody is manipulative or dishonest, her story says everybody is.  And meeting me, getting to know me, I don't fit that story.  So she had to invent a way to make me fit her story.
That was apparently much easier to do when she didn't have to actually interact with me.

So I guess that's a positive way to look at it.

And that's where I am going to end this post.  Because I insist that everything I look at have a positive spin.
All of these things, the whole series of less than wonderful things to happen this month, someday I will look back and they will all be past tense.  They are all temporary.
Much worse things could happen.  Much worse things have happened, and are happening to people all the time.
It is just wearing me down that there are so many in such a small span of time.  It's cortisol that makes me feel this way.  Its stress.
I need sex and cuddling and a few good nights sleep (the first two will help with the third) and to spend some time in a less toxic environment and some more friends (so that at any given moment there is someone to talk to) and some rest.  I need some time to pass.  Eventually I'll get all of those things, and life will go back to its default state of basically good all the time.

Science!

By Bakari Kafele | April 28th 2010 09:24 AM


Introduction:
(One simple rule)

Science is not guys in lab coats.  Science is not beakers and test tubes, or fancy expensive equipment that requires a degree to operate.
Science isn't something funded by corporations or the government or universities.

Science isn't even chemistry or physics or biology.  It’s (unfortunately) not something taught in school.

In its absolute simplest form, science can be boiled down to one straight-forward rule:

Check that you're right.



Part "I can't believe I even need to cover this, but lets get it out of the way":
(Insanity does not equal enlightenment)



I spoke to a number of people about this essay as I was still working on it.
A recurring theme came up.
So I realized I have to get this out of the way before I can even begin...

There was a time when not being able to distinguish between ones own imagination and the outside world around you was considered mental illness.  It was generally referred to as schizophrenia

(note: embedded links, such as this one, are just for reference.  Links which are spelled out on separate lines are actually intended to be clicked and read before going on with this essay.  I don't summarize them, and assume you read them in what follows)

Apparently an awful lot of us have come to believe that schizophrenia represents the highest level of consciousness:

"What ever you believe is true, is true." 
"All that matters is what is true for you."
"Everything is relative"
"Everyone's reality is different"

At the very least, this represents an extreme form of narcissism; to believe that the entire universe literally revolves around oneself, to the point of thinking what is "real" depends on what you believe.

If it were really true, it could only be true for one person.

Since you can feel and think, you (you, reading this right now) know you exist.

The world can't be in someone else's mind.

If it were true that perception defines reality, this would mean that everything else would cease to exist if you died.

Hopefully you don't really believe that; do you?

If all of us are really here together, then there must be some things that are real outside of our individual minds, some world that is not dependent on us thinking about it in order to be there.


Of course it is technically true that there is no way to ever be 100% sure that all of this isn't your dream or hallucination.

But if we go with that, that's the end of the conversation right there.
There is nothing else to talk about.  Since literally anything is technically possible, any thought what-so-ever gets cut off by the "how do you know this isn't all a fantasy?" argument, and it isn't terribly useful.

Here in the real world, every time you get out of bed, go to work or school or the grocery store, duck out of the way of something thrown at you or dodge a car coming at you, every time you do literally anything at all, you are making the assumption that there is a real world out there outside of your own mind. 

If someone really believed that all points of view are equally valid, they would simply curl up into a ball and choose to feel unending bliss for the rest of eternity.

If that doesn't seem meaningful enough, this alone says you acknowledge there is something outside of your mind, something which can have meaning.

Given the assumption that there is a reality outside our minds, science says we can build an understanding of that reality;  in fact, even if this were a dream or a fantasy, within that dream there is consistency, and we are no less able to figure out how the world (or dream) we live in works.

For the sake of practicality and simplicity, let’s make the assumption that the world does actually exist.

There is actually a world outside of our knowledge of it, and it remains exactly the same whether we know about it or not.

It’s all very fun to think about subjectivity, questions like "if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"


But if a person believes that gravity pulls objects away from the earth, and consequently lets go of a bowling ball expecting it to float away like a balloon, his belief will not prevent the falling ball from breaking his foot. 
What he believes does not change reality.  Reality is the same whether we know what is true or not.  In the end, it's individual belief that doesn't matter at all.

The answer to the tree falling in the forest question is: the disturbance of the falling tree causes vibrations in the air which propagate as waves identical to those that we call "sound".  Whether you choose to classify it as sound without it being heard by something conscious is merely semantic, and in the end doesn't change the reality of the situation one bit.

For the sake of truth and understanding, let’s drop our overblown egos.
Nobody cares what is "true for you"... and nobody should.





Part 2 (This is not merely an academic or philosophical issue)


Here in the real world, actions have consequences. 

People can feel joy and pain.  All other things being equal, most of us can agree that causing more joy or less suffering in the world is generally a good thing.  Most people go through life attempting to make things better; if not for the world at large, at least those around them (and if not that, at the very least for themselves).  In order to turn plan into effective action, it is necessary to have accurate information. 

Our schizophrenic friend who doesn't "believe in" gravity does not want a broken foot.  The fact that he believes something false about the world leads to an action (dropping the ball) that ultimately brings slightly more unpleasantness into the world.


When a parent forgoes legitimate medical treatment for their child in favor of faith healing, homeopathy, or acupuncture; when legislators pass laws based on a single memorable (but very rare) case which has broad unintended impacts (3-strikes); when school districts mandate that religion be taught side-by-side (or even instead of) science; when the public opposes nationalized health care due to believing it will make health care more expensive and opposes the estate tax believing it hurts middle class; when a jury sentences someone to prison when there was no physical evidence...

All of these things are issues which (complex though they may be) could have been decided very differently, if truth were valued over individual belief.  These are all things which end up affecting real people in negative ways, (and not just the people making the decisions).

The idea that the truth is what you make it and that perception defines reality is false, and this is important because it leads to people making bad decisions which end up being destructive.


In the mid-90's, under republican governor Pete Wilson, California began changing the electricity industry.

The new rules called for public utilities to sell off a significant part of their electricity generation to wholly private, unregulated companies (such as  Enron) which then became the wholesalers from which public utilities needed to buy the electricity which they used to own themselves.

"Wilson admitted publicly that defects in the deregulation system would need fixing by "the next governor"".[wikipedia]

In 2000, just as the last of the rules put into place under his predecessor went into effect, democratic governor Grey Davis took office.  For years energy trading companies - who did not actually produce any energy themselves - had been working behind the scenes to fill the void of government regulation by manipulating markets to their own advantage.  As the final stages of deregulation came into effect, they went too far, deliberately shutting down plants in order to reduce supply and raise prices, and causing major blackouts throughout the state.

Davis inherited this situation and was largely powerless to do anything about it in real time.

Instead of blaming the republican governor which had pushed for deregulation in the first place, or the state senate that had approved it, or the companies which were (illegally) manipulating the energy supply for personal gain, the voters of California went after the most visible target, the person who happened to be in charge right at the moment, Governor Davis.

Primarily as a result of the energy crises, a recall election was held and in his place, the people elected another republican governor, another fan of free-market economics.


This, to me, is a failure of the American educational system.

It is a failure of people to apply basic science to real life, and to check that beliefs are right, before acting on them.

(Basically, just making stuff up)


The only alternatives to science are intuition, "common sense", and faith.

Intuition is really some deep parts of the brain that we don't have conscious access to, collecting data, weighing evidence, and making deductions, somewhat similar to how we consciously make decisions.  There are in fact occasionally times when this process gets it right even when the conscious mind gets tripped up.  Intuition might be called subconscious reasoning. 

It is subject to all the natural cognitive errors the human mind naturally makes.

Conscious thought is also subject to those same errors of course, but the major difference is that it is possible to be aware of and correct for them when it’s conscious.  The subconscious mind will continue to make the same mistakes, even if a person consciously knows better.  Prejudices are an excellent example of this.

Common sense, in addition to not always being that common, is not always sensible.  There are relatively few things, at least in modern America, which are universal enough to be called "common".  Much of what is referred to as "sense" in this context starts as an assumption on one person's part, and is taken on faith by enough people that eventually no one questions it. 

Another definition of common sense is just "conventional wisdom", or "generally accepted claim" but there is no guarantee that it is based on anything valid.  An urban legend which many people believe falls under a similar category.  A few examples: shaving makes hair grow back thicker, eating sugar leads to being hyper, reading in the dark is bad for the eyes, people need to drink 8 glasses of water per day (http://www.uamshealth.com/?id=866&sid=1).  There are a bunch more examples of things which "everyone knows". 
There's a couple in this list I believed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions.
If something is false, no matter how many people believe it, it is still just as false.  Many things which "everyone knows" started out because one loud and persuasive person was mistaken - or even deliberately making stuff up.

Faith is believing something without any (tangible) evidence at all.  It could be an internal feeling, or it could be accepting what someone else says.  Either way, one can't (or doesn't) verify that the belief is actually correct, assuming the one source of information to be unfailing.  It’s been described to me as "a different way of knowing".


In looking at science vs. internal faith, those who promote the latter generally avoid considering the error rate.

Every time you "know" something, and turn out to be wrong, having been wrong should call into question everything else which is "known" in the same way.  Instead we tend to ignore or forget all the times when intuition or faith or "just knowing" turned out to be wrong, focusing exclusively on that one or two times it was spot on accurate.  That one time could have been random luck, but to the person looking for it, it represents confirmation that they can have internal knowledge without any evidence.

It’s generally more appealing to look for what you want to find, then it is to honestly look at both the times that confirm what you want to believe AND the times that don't.



The last big one is another meaning of the word faith:  faith in someone else.  This could be a book written in the distant past or a preacher, but it is also accepting the word of anyone without questioning it.  This goes for teachers and doctors, and even scientists, as much as anyone else.  These people are all human, and, though they are more likely to understand and apply the principals of science and logic themselves, they are still subject to human errors and bias.  This isn't to say that no weight at all should be given to an individual's knowledge of a subject we may know less about, but taking anyone's word as absolute gospel is faith, just as it is in church.

If the issue at hand is still disputed among scientists, and if someone seems completely confident about the answer, this is actually a reason to trust them less, not more.  It is only when a particular answer has been found to be more or less universal, that a good scientist should be confident about it.

Experts in a particular field are subject to the same cognitive errors, assumptions, mistakes, and acceptance of anecdotes as the rest of us are.  It is always a good idea to double check their sources.

There was a person who told me that he was told by the official vehicle inspector in his state that it was illegal to change from power steering to manual in a car.  This didn't seem very likely to me, and it took me all of about 5 minutes to search for the vehicle code of his state online, and find the inspection requirements for the steering system.  Apparently the official inspector had simply made that up.

This mistake could easily have been avoided if, instead of just making things up, he applied the simple principal: check that you're right.  It wouldn't have been repeated had the person he told it to applied the rule before saying it to me.

One would hope that when a person's life is at stake, people would tend to be more careful.  But the people we trust as experts in health - doctors, who have spent 8 years in medical school and another 3 in residency - are no exception:

http://www.utne.com/2007-09-01/Science-Technology/A-Study-a-Day-Keeps-the-Doctor-Away.aspx

(links like this, on its own line, are intended not just as a side note, but as integral to this essay.  Its not too long, and its probably something you're going to want to be aware of)

One also has to consider any potential vested interests of any one source.  Those who calls themselves scientists, but who gets all of their funding from the industry they study may not be impartial; bias makes for bad science.


But what is a much more common problem in our society than putting absolute trust in experts is putting absolute faith into anecdotes.




(Its a story... it isn't anything)


It is unfortunate that we refer to a sample size of one single uncontrolled incident as "anecdotal evidence" because it is in fact not evidence at all.

The fact that your uncle’s friend put a hydrogen generator on his car and got twice the mileage out of it isn't just weak evidence.  It is nothing.  That your neighbor gave her child a homeopathic remedy and the kid got better is not evidence.  Did the friend have a dynometer handy, or a closed track to test on?  Might anything have changed about his driving style?  How often do children get sick and recover with no medicine or treatment of any kind?  Could it have been a coincidence that the machine and the drug were applied shortly before the change was observed?  Might it be that expecting it to work changed the outcome more than the actual change?

If a dozen people tried something and it failed, but for one person it succeeded, who is most likely to repeat their story?

The dozen failures don't bother to mention it, so all we hear about is the one success.



One of the most common errors the human mind makes is the assumption that two things happening at a similar time must be related, but in fact temporal proximity alone does not imply correlation.  The fact that two things happen in the same general time period once or twice could easily just be a coincidence.  Further, even if two events are correlated, correlation does not imply causation.  Just because two things are connected does not show that one caused the other. It could be that one thing causes another in some circumstances, but not all.  Perhaps both were caused by the same third thing, and that original source that caused both things is still unknown at the moment.  Since nearly everyone makes that assumption, and outside of formal science pretty much no one controls for it with multiple controlled trials, almost every anecdote has no more evidence than temporal proximity.  But the stories get repeated, and when repeated with confidence, or often enough, they become accepted as true no matter how wrong they may be.




Part 3: (Even good science makes mistakes. Just not that often)


Some will point out that science sometimes makes mistakes.

This is true.

First off, though, we need to honestly access how often it makes mistakes, relative to other basis for belief.

a) Many things one might call mistakes of "science" really were never science at all. Many seeming examples were actually deliberate corruption of research for social and/or political reasons.  Remember, science isn't guys in lab coats.  The fact that someone claims something is
scientific does not make it scientific.  Anything where the conclusion was decided in advance, to fit an agenda, inherently does not fit with the meaning of the word science.

b) Many things which may be seen as mistakes in science by the general public were never fully established or accepted within the scientific community. Hypothesis does not equal theory.  No single study is ever considered proof of a new idea. This is a very common mistake people make outside of science.  The result of a study is evidence of a hypothesis, not conclusive proof of a theory.
 In order to be accepted a given study or experiment has to be replicated, multiple times, independently. Published research gets peer reviewed, because no matter how objective and careful any one researcher is, we are all human and subject to making mistakes.  What becomes popularized in media was not necessarily ever accepted by scientific community as a whole. 

c) On rare occasion, mistakes actually are widely accepted. These are very rare (far more rare than errors in intuition, faith, common sense, and internal "knowing"). For example, it turns out there (probably) is no luminiferous aether after all, despite being largely accepted among physicists for many years.

But even here, science wins out over faith:
When faith or intuition discover new information which potentially uncovers a mistake, they invariably find an excuse - any excuse, however large of a stretch - to keep the original conclusion.

When mistakes are found out in science, science revises its theory. 

It is exactly for these reasons - the need for universality and error correction - that science's error rate is so much lower than any competing "way of knowing".  In admitting its own fallibility, it is more honest than self-assurance or dogma.

(Profound misunderstanding)



Some will claim that a scientific conclusion is dependent on culture, a certain way of thinking, even gender.

This illustrates a profound misunderstanding by the public of what science actually is. 

Science is not the exclusive realm of those people who have the official title of "scientist".

Science can not have a bias.  Science has no agenda, no point of view.  It is universal.  No matter who you are, where you live, what you believe, if you take two objects of the same shape and size, but different weights, to the top of a building and drop them, you will observe them falling at the same rate. 

Anyone can do any experiment themselves, and they will get the same result, anywhere in the world. No matter what your religion, what background, what beliefs you started out with, you can run the same experiment as someone else, and you will get the same result.  You can calculate the gravitational constant, or the speed of sound, or the curvature of the earth, yourself, with simple tools and math, if you want to verify that the accepted values are accurate.  Anyone can test the validity of genetics by breeding their own varieties of peas, buy a microscope and watch bacteria, or a telescope and examine the stars and planets.


There are, of course, some questions that will probably always be up for debate or that have no right or wrong answers.  Where did the universe come from? what constitutes consciousness? what is fundamental human nature (outside of social influence)?   But because we can't answer everything doesn't mean we can't be reasonably sure about plenty of others.



Part 4: (Predictably Irrational; The human brain's consistent errors)


Common sense and intuition consistently make certain mistakes time and time again, in everyone.  These mistakes are not really the fault of the person who makes them.  They are universal parts of the human mind.  We make certain assumptions automatically.  Our brains developed to make survival on the open grasslands as likely as possible, and sometimes it’s better to err on the side of caution when the stakes of error include potentially getting eaten.  But we don’t live on the savanna any longer, and our challenges have changed.  Our evolution hasn’t kept up with our technology.  This is why our instincts so often get things wrong.


Here there is a video that explores our natural cognitive errors a little closer.  It shows some excellent examples of why it is a bad idea to trust your own intuition (and in a much more entertaining way than my dry straightforward prose!) please take a moment to watch it:



http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html



Really, actually watch it! No, seriously, it's good.  It is a little long, but it’s worth it.  It is relevant and important to the point I am making here, so if you don't have time to watch it all right now, it may be best to stop reading here until you do. Then you can read more of this...



...



(...this pause is me waiting for you to finish watching...)




...




See, I told you you'd like it!







It gets deeper than mistaken predictions. This next video perhaps shows better why the natural ways in which our minds are irrational is important to consider. Our predictable irrationality affects our sense of morality, and from there it affects behavior

(this one is only half as long as the last one):



http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html



Here is a completely different example of our natural errors in cognition, a fun one with hidden cameras and unexpected twists.  If you are still a fan of astrology, this one is for you especially.

[un-embeddable video, please follow the link]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btP_vy5cQq4




That last video is titled "cold reading" though really the term is more properly applied to a much more interactive art than what it shows.  While this video neatly explains 100% of the perceived "accuracy" of written astrology, a good "psychic", a live astrologer, someone who speaks to the dead, or even alternative healers, can build off of the mark's - (um, sorry, I mean, client's), responses and give something much more personalized and therefore even more convincing, as the following video describes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xswt8B8-UTM


(if you have time, the following parts are all interesting too, but I'm just meaning for you to watch the first one)





Here is an example of it in practice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D5bWfZDIgA





To understand why all this works requires understanding subjective validation:

http://www.skepdic.com/subjectivevalidation.html



(and, if you have time: http://www.skepdic.com/coldread.html)



Subjective validation is an essential part of understanding not just how we can be taken advantage of, but also for understanding faith and intuition, and why they so often feel more accurate than they really are. 



Subjective validation goes a long way toward explaining the human mind and the errors we naturally make.  And being aware of it can help us avoid making them.

Subjective validation is a reason why our intuition, our "internal knowing" can be so consistently, predictably, wrong - and yet we continue to have faith in them.

It is, essentially, us looking for meaning.  Whether there really is any or not:



http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_on_believing_strange_things.html



In this last video, he mentions one of those fundamental errors of human reasoning - which we could easily compensate for if only we were more aware of it.



"You have to keep track of the misses, and not just the hits". 

We naturally remember those times that fit what we are looking for and ignore or forget the ones that don't, making it easy to find meaning where there is none.



Subjective validation is why we so often feel that correlation is causation, that temporal proximity is correlation, and believe in superstitions.  We tend to find reasons to believe what we had already decided were true.  We tend to look for evidence that supports it and ignore whatever conflicts with it.  We find ways to "rationalize" things that we really want to believe due to feeling or faith.  Fortunate coincidences become religious experiences, and deeply held feelings become spiritual.  Alternative treatments make a person feel better, and that's taken as evidence that it must be working.  The government lowers taxes, the economy does well, and it’s seen as confirmation of supply side economics.  For those who want to believe, its all too easy to ignore that people feel equally better from placebo...

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-05-20/#feature

or that the economy has done equally well with high tax rates many times in the past.

http://www.slate.com/id/2245781/







Fortunately for modern humans, we also have the ability to think things through, to recognize our own mental limitations, and in doing so to compensate for them.





The Greeks started cataloging some of our common fallacies thousands of years ago.  For example: "post hoc ergo propter hoc" - this happened immediately after that, therefore that must have caused this.

We also are particularly prone to thinking that because someone of importance believes something, it’s more likely to be true, or that if popular consensus holds a view its most likely correct.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies



Notice that each one has a fancy Greek name, and a complicated sounding technical explanation.

But notice also how each one has a very simple example afterward.

It is easy to see how many people can and do make these sort of incorrect assumptions, constantly - and also why they are wrong, by looking at the examples following each one.  We have all made these mistakes now and again.



I was talking to someone on this topic who said she had taken "logic" class in college.  She said she hadn't gotten anything from it, that it was overly complicated and that her "mind doesn't work that way".

But that's just it - no one's mind works that way. 

That's the whole reason it is so important to learn.



Unfortunately most college level classes deal with things like the history of philosophers, delving into unsolvable problems, and considering the different schools of thought on various complex issues.



What I am talking about is much more basic than that.  What I am saying we need to learn about is the ways common sense leads us to the wrong answers - and it should be at an age early enough that we can assimilate it into our minds as thoroughly as we do reading and counting and basic arithmetic.  Nobody comes into the world knowing how to read or add. We learn it young, while our minds are primed for learning, and by adulthood we don't have to think about it.  We don't have to sound out each word, or write down a two digit addition problem in order to solve it.  If we learned these things for the first time in college though, it would be a lot more challenging.





(Don't believe everything you see)





One simple example of realizing and understanding all of the ways that our natural perception and intuition can get things wrong is optical illusions:



http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/



Scroll through a couple by clicking the "tour" button at the top, or just select some from the list of pictures on the right. 

I find "rotating snake" and "motion after effect..." particularly creepy, just because I know it’s not moving, but I just can't stop my mind from seeing it as though it is. 

And if you have any doubt it is your own mind creating these effects, and not some web page trick, "spiral aftereffect" makes the real world around you warble.



Here are a few more, in a fun little video:



http://www.ted.com/talks/al_seckel_says_our_brains_are_mis_wired.html







Everyone is aware that these exists, but we generally don't take the lesson they offer and apply it to everyday life: 

Seeing is not always believing.



Just for emphasis, let me repeat that.  You just saw a bunch of things with your own two eyes which did not accurately reflect reality.

Seeing is not always believing.



Seeing something with your own two eyes is not proof that something exists/happened, because the eyes - and more importantly, the mind - can be tricked or mistaken.





Here's a totally different approach, but equally simple and with the same implications (this one is only a couple minutes):



http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/



and another:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pK0BQ9CUHk


(Don't skip this one.  Its less than one minute long, and you'll be tested on it in a second)

...



...



...





We all tend to see what we are looking for, and not notice what we aren't.



This last simple video should make people stop and question the value of eye witness testimony. 

But despite the well documented limitations of human awareness (under even normal, stress-less situations) juries continue to give far more weight to eye-witnesses than to actual concrete evidence.

This ends up having a profound and tragic effect: of hundreds of people wrongly convicted of capital crimes and proven to be innocent by DNA evidence (which was unavailable at trial time) 75% had been positively identified by an eye-witness!

All of these eye-witnesses were not deliberately trying to get innocent people convicted.  They believed with absolute certainty that the person at the defendant table was the same person who they saw commit the crime. 



And they were wrong.

Every jury should be required to watch the counting basketball video before hearing eye-witness testimony.  You just failed to notice a guy moonwalking in a gorilla suit, under perfectly calm conditions when your focus was on the screen - how likely is it an eye-witness saw everything clearly under the stress of a crime-in-progress?

It’s easy to place blame on the particular individuals who made the mistake, but its something we are all capable of.

It’s something to keep in mind the next time you are 100% sure about something which you don't have any tangible evidence of.

(p.s. in case you were waiting, there really isn't a test on the moonwalking gorilla video)




It doesn't stop at seeing what isn't there and not seeing what is either.



http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_barry_does_brain_magic.html





What this means is not that we should discredit everything we experience, or give up entirely on understanding the world.  It just means we have to take the time and effort to look a little deeper.  It means we have to be careful.  Every single phenomenon shown in the optical illusions page, in the various videos, with a little investigation and thought, with understanding of optics and neurology and psychology, they can all be explained and understood.







Part 4 (Knowledge fish leads to a nation of Americans)







They say "give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime."

We think of the purpose of education as being teaching people to fish.



But really, what we teach (at least in America) is facts and techniques.  We are giving children knowledge fish.  What is more important than learning 'stuff' would be learning how to learn. 



There is constantly overwhelming amounts of information thrown at us. There are people who believe all sorts of conflicting things, books and TV and internet and friends and teachers and...

We need to know what to filter.  We need to know how to think critically, how to make deductions from the facts we know, how to double check our conclusions.  Not just on homework assignments, but in real life.  If we learn how to make the most of our capacity for intelligence, we can use that to go out into the world and learn on our own. 

If we just learn facts and methods to solve homework problems, we can pass tests, but not much else.  Once you get out of school, work a few years, you aren't going to remember the steps you used to do your middle school homework.  When it comes time to sign a contract and you need to compare possible interest rates and down payment calculations, if you actually understood the theory behind what you were learning back then, it will be no problem to figure out the steps to take all over again.



It was true even before "no child left behind" that our educational system "taught to the test", but since it has only gotten worse.  The fastest and easiest way to get test scores up is having kids memorize the right answers, or shortcuts to get to them.  We give them intellectual fish.

No surprise then, that on the "Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. 15 year-olds scored below most selected nations in 2006, and... dropped ... in both mathematics and science [compared to 2000]" and "the average mathematics score of U.S. students was lower than scores in 18 comparison nations (out of 24), and higher than those in 4 other countries—3 of them developing economies."

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind10/pdf/c01.pdf



As adults our retention of even basic facts about the world and how it works elude most of us.  Chances are even you miss a few fundamentals.
Give it a try:



http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_drori_on_what_we_think_we_know.html.



These are pretty basic things, which anyone who went to school should know (I missed some myself).





When tested for facts and procedures, US students actually score in the center of other advanced and developing nations. On the other hand, when tested for problem solving ability and applying what they have learned to new situations, we come in at the bottom (page 16).

No wonder our adult population fares so poorly on facts.  When we first were taught these things as children, we may have memorized the facts, but most of us never truly understood it, so once test time is past, we tend to forget it.



While many see the solution for our failings in education as being a sign that we need either to put more money in education (which is surely true, but certainly not enough by itself) or reward and punish teachers more severely (as though they aren't actually trying) the real problem seems to be the people who get to set standards and curricula (district administrators, state and federal education secretaries) and those who train teachers themselves, all suffering from ignorance of evidence and lack of rationality - in short, the principals of science applied to real life - in favor of theory and anecdote and what they want to be true.



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?em





I strongly suspect all of this explains why Americans level of superstition and religion is so much higher than it is in any other developed nation.



http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/bishop_19_3.html



Before we had telescopes, it wasn't so unreasonable to think stars were the flaming chariots of the gods.

Only a few hundred years ago, people believed that the Earth was the center of the entire universe; that the stars rotated around us.  Today we know with certainty that we are not the center of the galaxy, or even of our own solar system.  The stars are burning balls of hydrogen and helium, just like our sun. They are thousands of light years away (or one quadrillion miles away, give or take). In fact, they are so far away that what we see is not the stars as they are, but how they were thousands of years ago, because it takes even light (the fastest thing that there is) thousands of years to travel quadrillions of miles.

The total effect stars have on anything that happens here is less than the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the planet - except for how they affect human behavior as a result of belief in astrology.

Given that the position of the sun and moon in the sky correlated with the seasons and tides and other earthly events it wasn't so unreasonable to imagine that the stars or planets might have some earthly effects or predictions as well, and from that developed the idea of astrology.

Today, given what we know about how the world works, believing in astrology is indefensible...



Today 30-40% of Americans believe the stars and planets can effect, or at least predict, what will happen in our lives.





In Europe even the majority of Catholic priests and other Christian leaders do not believe in literal creationism.  Not only do we have a strong theory for how evolution occurs, and overwhelming evidence in support of it, but we can actually watch it occur, in real time, by producing bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics (we used to do this in the microbiology lab at my junior college, as part of a lesson). There is no question at all that evolution occurs. We have even sequenced DNA and transplanted genes. 

50% of Americans believe in literal creationism.

Another third believe in intelligent design.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm



50% of Americans believe in ghosts, 60% of Americans believe in physic powers, and 70% believe magnets can heal people.

http://www.harrisi.org/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=359



http://www.gallup.com/poll/21811/american-beliefs-evolution-vs-bibles-explanation-human-origins.aspx






One fundamental claim made by the supporters of free-market libertarian economics is that individuals act out of rational self-interest.  Aside from the issues around the tragedy of the commons and the public good, this claim is itself demonstrably false:



http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html
(this is one of my favorites)



Of course, in the right hands, this could be used in a good way:

http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_man.html





But in reality, human nature and psychology is usually exploited by corporate interests for financial gain:

(ok, the following documentary series is 4 parts long of nearly an hour each. Maybe I can't convince you to watch the whole thing right now.  At least watch the first one.  Or the first half.  And do come back and watch at least the first one.  This little known history explains an extremely profound shift in the collective American consciousness from citizen to consumer, and from community oriented to individualism.  It has lead directly to the consumerism and individualism of today, and this history is virtually unknown by most of us.)




http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1122532358497501036



The people who believe in all this non-sense circulating everywhere are the same people who are susceptible to the Rush Limbaughs, Glen Becks, Ayn Rands, and everyone else who make arguments which, upon careful examination, don't really make any sense. Given the right context, their arguments feel right, and since we are not taught to examine things rationally, our default is to accept what feels right as truth.



Ayn Rand wrote a book called "The Virtue of Selfishness" in which she breaks down her theories clearly and explicitly.  It is chock full of blatantly false premises and assumptions, fallacies of logic, and generally ignores reality in favor of a twisted, and totally amoral, idealism.  But few people are introduced to her ideas in that form.  They read her novels, which hide her philosophy in fable form, in fiction stories where she controls all the variables of reality, of cause and effect, of how people behave. In story form it is easy to make pretty much any position seem reasonable.  Bibles of all forms are filled with stories and fables and allegories and poetry which appeals to emotion and only hints at and implies what should be believed; and this is the best - perhaps only - way to indoctrinate people.





All of this matters because Alan Greenspan, one of the most powerful individuals in directing the world economy, was a fan of Ayn Rand.  It matters because Regan and Thatcher and the entire direction of conservative economics were guided by those same ideas.  It matters because half the American people are guided by religious texts.



All of this matters because these same Americans are the ones who voted for Bush Jr. 

Twice. 



http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/22/opinion/polls/main657083.shtml



They are the same people who enable the gross inequality of America, and the designation of corporations as persons, by voting for the people who enact those policies. These are the same Americans who are terrified of Arabs half a world away - but think nothing of driving 75mph on a daily basis.  These are the same people who accept the trickle down theory of economics and believe that buying ever more stuff will make them happier.



Part 5
(Check that you're right)



Religious people claim belief in science is a form of faith.  Radical liberals claim science has a social bias when it conflicts with what they claim.  A teacher friend recently told me that science represented "a way" of looking at something.  I read a feminist writer claim that science represents a male way of thinking.


I believe all of this is a failure to teach what should be the most fundamental aspects of what governs the human capacity for reason and intelligence.


Again:
Science is not guys in lab coats. 


Science is not beakers and test tubes, or fancy expensive equipment that requires a degree to operate.  Science isn't something funded by corporations or the government or universities.

Science isn't even chemistry or physics or biology.  Its (unfortunately) not something taught in school.


In its absolute simplest form, science can be boiled down to one straight-forward rule:

Check that you're right.

Before accepting something as true, and especially before repeating it, check that you're right.  Don't just guess, and don't just take someone's word for it.



http://www.ted.com/talks/kary_mullis_on_what_scientists_do.html



Science means never making any assumptions, never making axioms or absolute rules or taking anything on faith.



In order for a conclusion to be drawn from a particular experiment, the same results should be obtained by anyone who runs it.  No matter who they are.



Of course, reality is very complex, and as a result, checking isn't always simple.  But thanks to our big brains, over thousands of years of human existence, we have been able to figure out methods to check just about any idea fairly reliably.



You start with only things that you can observe, see / feel / hear, as your starting information.  You use deductive logic to make tentative conclusions consistent with what you already know; a hypothesis for why the observed things behaved the way they did.

Then to test it, you use the new hypothesis to make predictions that should follow from it.  And you check to see if the predictions are right.



If not, you throw out the hypothesis and start over. 

If the predictions occur as expected, its time for another test.  You let other people in other places check your work for you, and still others run tests of their own.   Eventually, your hypothesis may become a theory.  The more you test, the stronger the theory is. 

But it is always a theory.  One major thing that distinguishes science is that if new evidence is found that disproves a belief, then that belief gets thrown out. Even Newton's theories about gravity, as strong as they were, were eventually superseded by Einstein's relativity.

Theory is the highest level of science - hence evolution and gravity still both being theories. There is no dogma in science, no axioms or faith, nothing which is sacred or unquestionable, no fundamentals assumed to be true.  Science is not a form of faith.  Anyone can test it and if it is found to be wrong, it changes.  It is literally the opposite of faith.



This is what they taught us about science in elementary school:


Observation > hypothesis > prediction > experiment > theory.


This actually a decent summary, but alone it isn't clear how this applies not only to the school subjects called "science" but to every area of human knowledge and understanding.  In more general terms we call it logic, rationality, or critical thinking, but those terms suffer from the same limitations that "science" does, of being relegated to the content of a particular class, with no bearing on real life.  I was told recently exactly that in conversation, from the person who had taken a college course on logic, and didn't feel she had gotten anything from it. 



But just as science doesn't mean guys in lab coats and electronauticalspectrograph machines making grand pronouncements about some esoteric topic, logic doesn't mean the history of philosophy, or math based logic problems, ethical conundrums, brain teasers, or memorizing lists of rules.



Like science, logic and reason are real world ways to remove subjectivity and bias from our understanding of the world, so we can actually know something - at least as best as we possibly can - which is true, and not just a guess.

When we use observation and logic to arrive at our understanding of the world we have the opportunity to make better choices, choices which are more likely to achieve our goals.  When we rely instead on faith, we more often start with faulty premises, leading the faulty conclusions, leading to mistakes that could have been avoided.




(One final point: Corruption of the concept)



You have probably got the point by this point.  Ok, ok, rationality is useful; science is not just for the classroom, being aware of the ways in which the human mind is subject to consistent error can help avoid making those errors.

Unfortunately, people who wish to convince people of their own agenda are well aware of science, and it is all too easy to corrupt.


So, you have creationism leaving Sunday school, and entering regular school in "science" textbooks under the name 'intelligent design':

"Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling, this book was not written for them" ["Biology: Third Edition" Bob Jones University Press]



http://richarddawkins.net/articles/2478



You have homeopathy pointing to the few small studies the support it while ignoring the overwhelming number of ones which don't, and using arguments such as "the remedy is tailored to the specific individual, therefore it can not be tested in the traditional way"

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-01-14/#feature



You have proponents of literal karma (not just that being nice to people causes people to be nice to you in return, but that the cosmos itself returns "good" acts with good fortune, even into different lifetimes), explaining it as the "law of cause and effect"

http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/karma/ka-jal.htm



I even spoke to someone recently who seemed to feel that astrology was verified by the fact that an astrology book was able to predict an eclipse.



All four of these have the same thing missing, and its a new issue from what I've mentioned thus far.

It is neatly summed up by this cartoon:



http://www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/pic/miracle.jpg

(which you may recognize if you've been watching all the videos)



They all suffer from missing any clear mechanism of action.  This step is skipped all too often.  By what means did you "just know" what was going to happen?  How could have Governor Davis have caused the power shortage?  How does karma wrap around time and space and lifetimes and affect a specific individual in a way that restores cosmic balance?  When making the jump from "one thing happened and then something else happened after it", question how the one might have exerted direct influence over the other. 

Don't have an answer?  Certainly that isn't disproof.  Maybe it is an issue of cause and effect.  But unless you can explain how, it is premature to say with confidence that it is. If there was a connection once, it may be no more than a coincidence.  If you run the same experiment over
and over again, and find the same connection, what you have is a correlation.  But if you can't explain how A caused B, you still don't have enough to say it did.  Where that leaves you is, now you need to do more research.



There are times when perhaps you don't care enough about the answer to do that research.  All I am saying is when that is the case, be honest and leave it at: I don't know.  There should be no shame in saying "I don't know".  There is a lot to know in this world.  It is dishonest, and downright dangerous, to pretend to be confident about things you have no way to be sure of.



There are other things which you really do want to get to the bottom of, to know for sure, in order to make good choices that have a positive effect on life.





Part 6
(The good news)


Lucky for us, we happen to live in a time in history where each of us has more access to information than was available to the entire sum of all humanity only a few hundred years ago.  Here at home (or school or the library or where ever you are right now) we have access to information which would have taken days, or weeks, to look up just tens of years ago.



1000 years ago in Asia and 500 in Europe, moveable type was invented, and the written word gradually became available to the masses.  With time education became free and universal and mandatory, libraries became commonplace, daily newspapers let us know what is happening almost in real time.  For the first 200,000 years or so of human existence it was entirely understandable that people were superstitious and irrational.  It was not ignorance; it was simply lack of information.


It the age of Google (Google makes peer-reviewed journals, books, and now even newspapers available online, largely for free) and Wikipedia (Wikipedia has 15 million pages, almost all with references and footnotes) there is no excuse.



Nearly any topic you can think of, someone somewhere has thought of it, investigated it thoroughly, written about what they learned, and then put it online.

There is, obviously, an enormous amount of ridiculous crap online.  Here, as I mentioned earlier about education, what matters is not the facts we already know, but our ability to filter.  Our tendency is to filter based on what we start out believing, or what feels most right.  This obviously will only lead to supporting what one wants to be true, not to learning what is.

What Wikipedia has done is, along with its vast amounts of information, is provide sources for every claim.  Where a statement goes un-foot-noted, that fact itself is noted.  Click on the tiny superscript number and you can trace the origin of a statement.  Go back further, you can find who made it, who's paying them, what other claims they make, what agenda they may have and what bias.  Then, because no one study provides more than evidence, check out another.  Read the opposing arguments - always read the opposing arguments - and not just the ones that support your own belief. 

Take your own personal experience out of the equation - one single personal experience, even your own, is merely an anecdote, and it isn't evidence one way or the other. It’s just a story.



I was recently questioning a food based medicine regiment that sounded to be like it bordered on "alternative" (while its thought of as an alternative to mainstream western medicine, the more accurate definition is any medical treatment which has not been scientifically confirmed to be more effective than placebo).  I was shown a study that supported it.  On further investigation, however, I found that the study was conducted by a group which is funded primarily by major industrial food and drug companies.  Given the enormous conflict of interest that presents, I went on to find more independent sources. 



Results?  Inconclusive.  There seems to be legitimate research which points both ways. 

This is not the most gratifying conclusion.

But it is the most honest one.  It is the truth.



And this is what it all comes down to, in the end.  Often times the truth isn't what we want to hear. 



We can either get instant gratification and comfort from fantasy world, OR we can base decisions on the best information available and create positive change in our own lives and the lives of those around us.


In a world where actions have consequences, we cannot do both.


I think it is of absolutely vital importance that we all ask ourselves: which is more important?















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Interested in understanding some of the specific ways our brains make mistakes - so you can learn to avoid making them yourself?
This is my new favorite website: http://youarenotsosmart.com/

Each post explores a specific universal mistake that the human brain naturally makes in detail, with fun stories and examples and pictures.  Most of the topics are also covered in audio form in podcasts, as well as in an actual paper book.  If I had discovered it back when I wrote this essay, there would be links to it sprinkled liberally throughout, but I didn't, so just go explore it on your own.