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)
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:
"The problem is that most of us have become utterly dependent on this industrial-technological system for all of our needs and wants. Shopping is as important as oxygen to us. Close down the malls for a few days and people go crazy. We no longer think of ourselves as citizens but as ”consumers”, a descriptive term that I've always found kind of derogatory. This dependence is so fundamental that it goes unseen, much like fish don't see the water they swim in. Consequentially, the only solution we can think of whenever we struggle with unfulfilled needs or wants is to ”earn more” and start a side-business, negotiate a raise, and gamble on some more education – it's an investment in your future (ha!). The only perceived way to a better so-called standard-of-living is to work harder and smarter and earn more. However, what this often results in is more environmental damage or at best reshufling money from suckers to scammers." - Jacob Lund Fisker
In order to protest income inequality, instead of attacking the corporations who pay minimum wage or outsource their labor, despite huge profits and huge executive compensation, we attack a corporation that actually pays well - and goes beyond good pay to provide (among other things) an alternative to car commuting. Which means the goal isn't to actually ensure everyone has a living wage and can afford decent housing, its just to drag everyone else down to the lowest common denominator. Actually, its not even that, since its the buses that have drawn anger, representing reasonably paid people moving into poor neighborhoods. Our solution to inequality and poverty is... segregation!
Really?
When middle class whites moved out of urban areas, it was called "white flight", and activists objected, because it made life harder for poor residents by turning them into ghettos. Now middle class whites are moving back, and even though you can't evict someone just to get higher rent in a rent controlled city, we call it "gentrification" and claim it is making life harder for the poor residents.
Now, I understand it is easier and more gratifying to pick an enemy to hate, and to throw stuff and be destructive than it is to think critically about complex issues - but is it too much to ask to go after WalMart and McDonalds and all the other low wage and outsourcing companies?
When I have pointed all this out to people, they mostly agree that it isn't productive, but say it points to a larger issue regarding gentrification's affect on housing.I 100% agree with the notion that having a place to exist should be a basic human right. I have a major problem with the idea that one person can "own" the land that another person lives on. (More on that in upcoming posts)
However, living in the SF Bay Area is most certainly not a basic human right. Not all 7 billion humans in the world can live in the Bay Area.
High eviction rates didn't start because of tech companies. They started in 2008 with the foreclosure crises. High rents didn't start with tech companies. Rent has been higher than average here for at least a good hundred years. High rents are because everyone wants to live here - we have good weather and good culture - but there is a finite amount of space.
Increasing housing is like increasing traffic lanes to deal with traffic, the more you build, the more people drive. It is like buying a bigger belt to deal with obesity. You are at best temporarily solving a symptom, while the "solution" itself will ultimately only encourage an increase the size of the original problem. Along the way you either increase urban density (which has a direct correlation to crime rates) or you increase suburban sprawl (with its environmental consequences) and either way you increase traffic, parking, and pollution.
If a person has trouble affording rent here, there are lots of options:
1) Live with roommates (that's a popular one), or in an RV park (I used to), or do work-trade for rent (that's what I do now), or live in a communal house.
2) Apply for public assistance.
3) Live anywhere in the entire country other than Honolulu HI, New York City NY, or the SF Bay Area CA. Literally anywhere else. That leaves about 20,000 options.
It almost seems that the idea is people should be able to live where ever they want, even in places they can't afford (and we aren't talking about being forced out of an existing home, because we have rent control here) - except the entire objection is middle class people choosing to move somewhere less expensive. In other words, they should not be allowed to live where ever they want. Only poor people should. That seems a very odd and arbitrary way to try to even the score. I can think of a whole lot of much better ways.
Other people have said the issue is private use of public infrastructure. How about millions of people driving private cars on public roads? That solves the problem of transportation for yourself, while leaving everyone else behind.
How is it Google's responsibility to provide transportation for all people?
How would it benefit the people of Oakland if all Google employees drove their own personal cars to work instead, increasing the already excessive congestion on our highways?
I've been surprised to come across more and more references lately to a relatively new theory among some sex researchers that the reason women reflexively lubricate to certain stimuli which they don't self-report as being arousing is that it evolved as the body's way of protecting itself in the case of sexual assault.
Here is an example:
Genital response to sexual stimuli may be an evolved self-protection mechanism. Female genital response is an automatic reflex that is elicited by sexual stimuli and produces vaginal lubrication, even if the woman does not subjectively feel sexually aroused...Female genital response entails increased genital vasocongestion, necessary for the production of vaginal lubrication, and can, in turn, reduce discomfort and the possibility of injury during vaginal penetration. Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries that resulted in illness, infertility, or even death subsequent to unexpected or unwanted vaginal penetration, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring....Reports of women's genital response and orgasm during sexual assaults suggests that genital responses do occur in women under conditions of sexual threat. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/love-sex-and-babies/201105/why-do-women-get-physically-aroused-and-not-even-know-it
The first time I saw it it immediately struck me as suspect and I questioned it in the comments of the webpage that quoted it, and went on to forget it. But since then I've seen several more allusions to the same theory by different researchers in different contexts, and its really starting to bug me.
As I talked about in great length in my previous post, there is a nearly universal - albeit frequently subconscious - assumption in human society that women are inherently prone to being victims. This (largely baseless) assumption is just as strong among feminists as it is among traditionalists and patriarchs, although it takes different forms.
Obviously I would be delusional if I thought scientists were above social bias and herd mind, but I am disappointed that there doesn't seem to be anyone else questioning the theory that deliberately facilitating rape is a self-protective mechanism.
The theory in regards to the threat of rape is bad enough. But let me start with an even more ridiculous theory - a good number of sex researchers have actually suggested that this same rape facilitation mechanism is the reason that women are found to have physical arousal from various sexually themed images and stories which they subjectively report as not being sexy, including not only depictions of rape, but also lesbian sex and, in at least one case, monkey sex. Here's a couple examples of this theory being presented:
"women’s genital responses are usually non-specific: self-identified hetereosexual women have been shown to have similar genital responses to stimuli that depict hetereosexual, gay, or lesbian sex (Chivers et al., 2004). Women even show some genital responses to nonhuman primates having sex, while men do not (Chivers & Bailey, 2005). Importantly, this genital arousal in women seems to be automatic: it occurs before women even report feeling aroused (Laan, 1994) and even when they are not aware of its presence (Ponseti & Bosinski, 2010).
Men and women, then, seem to have strong differences in the type of stimuli that causes genital arousal. What might have caused this? It has been suggested that there is a functional account of the nonspecificity and automaticity of female genital arousal: The Preparation Hypothesis. It has been shown that increased blood flow is a precursor to vaginal lubrication (Levin, 2003) and suggested that this may serve as a protective function for women engaged in intercourse – consensual or otherwise (Chivers, 2005)." http://www.jimaceverett.com/genital_lubrication.html
And:
"Men’s genital arousal occurs in response to a limited number of sexual stimuli, whereas women’s genital arousal occurs in response to a wide range of sexual stimuli, including those depicting nonpreferred cues. Researchers have hypothesized that women’s nonspecific pattern of genital arousal prepares the body for sexual activity, thus functioning to protect the genital organs against injury. If this hypothesis is correct, women should show genital responses to any cues suggesting sexual activity..." http://www.centenary.edu/attachments/psychology/journal/archive/mar2011journalclub.pdf
And:
"Women, she says, are physically aroused by non-specific stimuli, everything from copulating primates to two men having sex. Even rape scenes can trigger a physical response...Dr. Chivers looks at the question from an evolutionary standpoint. As modern humans evolved, women who became lubricated at the slightest sexual signal would have been less likely to get injured or to contract diseases during sex, especially if it was forced on them. It could be a protective mechanism." http://www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/her-parts-desire/article1154587/
First of all, the theory doesn't even fit with available information. One study after another, with different researchers and different methods of determining arousal (vaginal lubrication, blood flow, heart rate, pupil dilation, brain scans) have all consistently found that the majority of women - regardless of stated sexual orientation, fetishes and preferences, exhibit physiological arousal from straight, gay male, and lesbian sexual imagry. Some have even found arousal in response to images of non-humans engaged in sex. However, one thing that consistently fails to elicit a response is images of an erect human penis without a larger sexual context. These theories for why women are so easily aroused by so many things (compared to men), echos the theory presented above in regards to assault - women's physical arousal is on a hair trigger for the purpose of facilitating being raped without injury.
It shouldn't take much to realize how absolutely stupid that theory is - which would women in the early stages of human evolution facing a threat of rape be more likely to see: two women having sex, two monkeys having sex, or an erect human penis? How often in human evolutionary theory were women presented with the threat of injury due to attempted rape by lesbians, gay men, or monkeys? Probably close to never percent of the time. In contrast, heterosexual non-consensual intercourse forced by a male attacker would include an erect penis exactly always percent of the time. This theory is so unbelievably nonsensical that I am literally at a loss for how to express just how stupid it is. And yet it is being suggested by quite a few otherwise respectable intelligent psychologists and sociologists and other sex researchers who work on investigating this sort of thing scientifically for a living!
I won't go any further in debunking the "women lubricate to lesbian porn so they won't be injured by male rapists" line of reasoning, because it is just plain stupid.
Instead, for the rest of this I'll focus on what appears on the surface to at least be logically consistent (although still wrong): that women are physically turned on by the threat of rape as a method of self-protection.
If the goal of self-preservation were primarily to avoid inducing others to injure you, then our response to threat from other humans would be neither Fight nor Flight. It would be Stay Perfectly Still, or perhaps Lie Down and Cry.
Human beings have the longest time to maturity, the most investment of any creature that requires parental care. This is almost certainly the reason why human females are much more selective of mating partners than both human males, and females of pretty much every other specie.
Further, outside of modern medical intervention, childbirth is frequently the single largest cause of death of women of child bearing age.
If the human female has evolved to increase the risk of undesired pregnancy by facilitating rape, in order to avoid what would most likely amount to comparatively minor cuts and bruises would be more than a little counter-productive.
And then there's that other little glaring piece of the equation; which I just don't understand how it escapes the attention of anyone presented with this theory...
There are two humans involved in intercourse, and both are using sensitive and vulnerable body parts! The theory pre-supposes that the vagina is soft and easily damaged, while the penis is somehow solid and indestructible - even though everyone knows this is false. The penis may be a symbol of strength, dominance, and power in human culture, but it is in actuality at risk of serious, painful, and rather dramatic injury from intercourse without sufficient lubrication and/or at the wrong angle.
My own, counter-theory, is that if, hypothetically, the response of the vagina to non-sexually-arousing stimulus was to become as dry as possible and for all the muscles to forceful contract, were a male rapist to attempt to proceed anyway it would cause at least as much physical injury to his sex parts as to hers, if not more.
I attempted to look up any medical reports or injury statistics that might confirm or refute that idea. I looked for anything about penile injuries during attempted or successful rape. I looked for for information about penile injuries during consensual but insufficiently lubricated anal intercourse. I looked for data on penile injury in either consensual or non-consensual prison sex, or about the rate and methods of lubrication used. As far as I can tell, none of this information has ever been collected, by anyone. The only thing I can find is confirmation that such injuries are possible, and they do happen, but zero about how common they are, or how often it is successfully avoided sans lubricant, or what the relative rates of injury or pain to "giver" and "receiver" are in any of those scenarios.
The closest I found was this study of a random sample of men in Kenya which was specifically looking for differences in penile injury rate related to circumcision and its affect on HIV transmission.
They found a majority of subjects reported at least a minor injury due to sex in just the past 6 months. This (unless an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of Kenyan men happen to be gay or rapists) is with ordinary consensual vaginal intercourse. Nearly half reported cuts, abrasions or bleeding. The majority were minor enough that they would have not sought medical treatment, and therefor would never have been reported.
Though Kenya is not specifically known for the practice, a number of southern African nations have a cultural preference for "dry" sex - i.e. many women make a deliberate effort, often using external agents, to prevent "excessive" natural lubrication. Sources conflict over whether this is intended solely for male pleasure, or to increase pleasure for both genders.
"Brown et al. found that many women respondents express a clear preference for dry, tight, sex. Respondents believe that if a man has a small penis, powders help create a good feeling for the woman. One woman explains, “A women feels no pleasure when the vagina has too much liquid.”(11)"
Looking further into reports of deliberate dry sex, researches almost exclusively focus on potential injury to the female as a result (much like research into intercourse caused injury in anal and non-consensual sex in the US) - however the reports do at least frequently acknowledge that the risk of injury goes both ways:
When asked specifically about any harmful effects of vaginal tightness and dryness, some participants admitted that an extremely dry vagina could cause problems. One man reported, “It’s natural for all guys to go crazy for a woman who is dry, but you have to make love carefully. If you want to be rough, you can get hurt. A man can get cuts and wounds and catch diseases” (Judith Brown, personal communication, November 1999)
The materials used for vaginal practices include traditional herbs and an array of natural products as well as common commercial p roducts such as alum, boric acid, and bactericides. According to Halperin, many women use these produc ts for ‘dry sex.’ Their partners have been found to suffer penile injuries, lacerations to the foreskin, and bleeding (Halperin 1999).
Unfortunately, none of them have any mention of the relative prevalence of pain or injury to male vs female partners.
I've found two sources with relative numbers - though neither is specifically regarding insufficient lubrication.
In a cross-sectional survey of general population residents of Cape Town, South Africa, 21% of men and 16% of women reported coital bleeding in the past 3 months, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16688100
Unfortunately, the summary does not distinguish between menses bleeding (the majority of reports) and injury, and it is unclear if the reports were of either partner's bleeding, or of self only. Either way it seems likely that those numbers indicate the frequency of injury to men to be higher. The initial paper likely does, but it has not yet been made available
The most conclusive I could find was this:
In all, 1454 cases of reported coital injuries were reviewed; 790 occurred in men while 664 occurred in women, mainly in the genital area. Physical urological complications were more common in men than in women. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11856110/
Which, again, is not specific to insufficient lubrication, but it shows a very clear higher risk of injury to male genitalia from various forms of sexual contact than to female.
This completely undermines the "self-protection from rape via facilitating rape" theory.
The opposite reaction would likely cause greater injury to an attacker than to the victim, and would therefore discourage rapists from attempting it in the first place.
My only purpose here is questioning the validity of the "facilitating rape is self-protective" claim, the very idea of which I suspect is only possible in a society with a deeply internalized misogyny.
I've been surprised to come across more and more references lately to a relatively new theory among some sex researchers that the reason women reflexively lubricate to certain stimuli which they don't self-report as being arousing is that it evolved as the body's way of protecting itself in the case of sexual assault.
Here is an example:
Genital response to sexual stimuli may be an evolved self-protection mechanism. Female genital response is an automatic reflex that is elicited by sexual stimuli and produces vaginal lubrication, even if the woman does not subjectively feel sexually aroused...Female genital response entails increased genital vasocongestion, necessary for the production of vaginal lubrication, and can, in turn, reduce discomfort and the possibility of injury during vaginal penetration. Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries that resulted in illness, infertility, or even death subsequent to unexpected or unwanted vaginal penetration, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring....Reports of women's genital response and orgasm during sexual assaults suggests that genital responses do occur in women under conditions of sexual threat. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/love-sex-and-babies/201105/why-do-women-get-physically-aroused-and-not-even-know-it
The first time I saw it it immediately struck me as suspect and I questioned it in the comments of the webpage that quoted it, and went on to forget it. But since then I've seen several more allusions to the same theory by different researchers in different contexts, and its really starting to bug me.
As I talked about in great length in my previous post, there is a nearly universal - albeit frequently subconscious - assumption in human society that women are inherently prone to being victims. This (largely baseless) assumption is just as strong among feminists as it is among traditionalists and patriarchs, although it takes different forms.
Obviously I would be delusional if I thought scientists were above social bias and herd mind, but I am disappointed that there doesn't seem to be anyone else questioning the theory that deliberately facilitating rape is a self-protective mechanism.
If the goal of self-preservation were primarily to avoid inducing others to injure you, than our response to threat from other humans would be neither Fight nor Flight. It would be Stay Perfectly Still, or perhaps Lie Down and Cry.
Human beings have the longest time to maturity, the most investment of any creature that requires parental care. This is almost certainly the reason why human females are much more selective of mating partners than both human males, and females of pretty much every other specie.
Further, outside of modern medical intervention, childbirth is frequently the single largest cause of death of women of child bearing age.
If the human female has evolved to increase the risk of undesired pregnancy by facilitating rape, in order to avoid what would most likely amount to comparatively minor cuts and bruises would be more than a little counter-productive.
And then there's that other little glaring piece of the equation; which I just don't understand how it escapes the attention of anyone presented with this theory...
There are two humans involved in intercourse, and both are using sensitive and vulnerable body parts! The theory pre-supposes that the vagina is soft and easily damaged, while the penis is somehow solid and indestructible - even though everyone knows this is false. The penis may be a symbol of strength, dominance, and power in human culture, but it is in actuality at risk of serious, painful, and rather dramatic injury from intercourse without sufficient lubrication and/or at the wrong angle.
My own, counter-theory, is that if, hypothetically, the response of the vagina to non-sexually-arousing stimulus was to become as dry as possible and for all the muscles to forceful contract, were a male rapist to attempt to proceed anyway it would cause at least as much physical injury to his sex parts as to hers, if not more.
I attempted to look up any medical reports or injury statistics that might confirm or refute that idea. I looked for anything about penile injuries during attempted or successful rape. I looked for for information about penile injuries during concensual but insufficently lubricated anal intercourse. I looked for data on penile injury in either consensual or non-consensual prison sex, or about the rate and methods of lubrication used. As far as I can tell, none of this information has ever been collected, by anyone. The only thing I can find is confirmation that such injuries are possible, and they do happen, but zero about how common they are, or how often it is successfully avoided sans lubricant, or what the relative rates of injury or pain to "giver" and "receiver" are in any of those scenarios.
The closest I found was this study of a random sample of men in Kenya which was specifically looking for differences in penile injury rate related to circumcision and its affect on HIV transmission.
They found a majority of subjects reported at least a minor injury due to sex in just the past 6 months. This (unless an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of Kenyan men happen to be gay or rapists) is with ordinary consensual vaginal intercourse. Nearly half reported cuts, abrasions or bleeding. The majority were minor enough that they would have not sought medical treatment, and therefor would never have been reported.
Though Kenya is not specifically known for the practice, a number of southern African nations have a cultural preference for "dry" sex - i.e. many women make a deliberate effort, often using external agents, to prevent "excessive" natural lubrication. Sources conflict over whether this is intended solely for male pleasure, or to increase pleasure for both genders.
"Brown et al. found that many women respondents express a clear preference for dry, tight, sex. Respondents believe that if a man has a small penis, powders help create a good feeling for the woman. One woman explains, “A women feels no pleasure when the vagina has too much liquid.”(11)"
Looking further into reports of deliberate dry sex, researches almost exclusively focus on potential injury to the female as a result (much like research into intercourse caused injury in anal and non-consensual sex in the US) - however the reports do at least frequently acknowledge that the risk of injury goes both ways:
When asked specifically about any harmful effects of vaginal tightness and dryness, some participants admitted that an extremely dry vagina could cause problems. One man reported, “It’s natural for all guys to go crazy for a woman who is dry, but you have to make love carefully. If you want to be rough, you can get hurt. A man can get cuts and wounds and catch diseases” (Judith Brown, personal communication, November 1999)
The materials used for vaginal practices include traditional herbs and an array of natural products as well as common commercial p roducts such as alum, boric acid, and bactericides. According to Halperin, many women use these produc ts for ‘dry sex.’ Their partners have been found to suffer penile injuries, lacerations to the foreskin, and bleeding (Halperin 1999).
http://paa2007.princeton.edu/papers/7131
Respondents believe that the man should hurt or suffer a little during penetration [Brown et. al]
Unfortunately, none of them have any mention of the relative prevalence of pain or injury to male vs female partners.
I've found two sources with relative numbers - though neither is specifically regarding insufficient lubrication.
In a cross-sectional survey of general population residents of Cape Town, South Africa, 21% of men and 16% of women reported coital bleeding in the past 3 months, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16688100
Unfortunately, the summary does not distinguish between menses bleeding (the majority of reports) and injury, and it is unclear if the reports were of either partner's bleeding, or of self only. Either way it seems likely that those numbers indicate the frequency of injury to men to be higher. The initial paper likely does, but it has not yet been made available
The most conclusive I could find was this:
In all, 1454 cases of reported coital injuries were reviewed; 790 occurred in men while 664 occurred in women, mainly in the genital area. Physical urological complications were more common in men than in women. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11856110/
Which, again, is not specific to insufficient lubrication, but it shows a very clear higher risk of injury to male genitalia from various forms of sexual contact than to female.
This completely undermines the "self-protection from rape via facilitating rape" theory.
The opposite reaction would likely cause greater injury to an attacker than to the victim, and would therefore discourage rapists from attempting it in the first place.
Of course the fact remains that women do produce lubrication in response to sexually explicit stimuli which they subjectively report as not being arousing, and the reason for that is still in question. I offer no theory of my own at this time (although the very first article I posted - http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/love-sex-and-babies/201105/why-do-women-get-physically-aroused-and-not-even-know-it - offers 3 alternative possible explanations). My only purpose here is questioning the validity of the "facilitating rape is self-protective" claim, the very idea of which I suspect is only possible in a society with a deeply internalized misogyny.
[much more evidence of our deeply internalized misogyny here: http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2013/01/RapeAndFeminismPage1.html ]
Just discovered what the ridiculous claim about non-verbal communication probably comes from - you know, where some corporate or academic class on effective communication claims that only 7% of a message is transmitted by the actual words (and the rest by tone and body language)?
This is of course just obviously false on the face of it: if it were true, we could communicate more effectively with someone who spoke a different language but was face-to-face with us than we could with someone who spoke the same language, but via chat (or a blog post).
But those numbers are very specific to just have been randomly made up... Here's where they come from: According to pychcology professor Albert Mehrabian:
When you first meet new people, their initial impression of you will be based 55% on your appearance and body-language, 38% on your style of speaking and only 7% on what you actually say.
Impression. Now that actually makes sense! Not message. Not communication. Impression.
Furthermore, he was speaking specifically about communication about feelings, and the degree to which a person's non-verbal communication matched the verbal - as in, if a person says "I'm fine, really", but they look and sound upset, you are likely to not believe them. In his own words, regarding this common misinterpretation of his work:
""Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking. Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like–dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable."
Whoever built cats, be it God or evolution, some sort of super intelligent space aliens or the ancient Egyptians, they made a pretty serious and, frankly, stupid, design flaw.
If for whatever reason a cat goes just a few days without eating, like all animals, they begin to metabolize their fat reserves for energy. Like all animals, this fat metabolization (along with many other tasks) is the job of the liver.
But, unlike every single other animal, a cat's liver is actually damaged by the process of metabolizing more than a tiny amount of fat at a time.
And just what symptoms does that type of liver damage cause? Why nausea, of course! Which in turn leads to anorexia. Which in turn leads to not eating. Which in turn leads to the body needing to burn more fat. Which in turn damages the liver further. Which in turn leads to more severe anorexia...
So, even if the original cause of the problem is no longer an issue, this cycle leads to death.
Its called Hepatic Lipidosis, and it can be triggered in as little as 3 DAYS without food.
Often times it is triggered by some other disease or medical condition, but it can also be triggered by stress, (from a move, or a new cat roommate, for example), or by a new brand of food. If they are wild, perhaps there just aren't any mice or birds around to catch for a few days in a row.
The treatment is regular food. But since they have no appetite, a cat's human has to manually feed them. And so the little Chairman gets a syringe-full or two of watered down canned food squirted into his mouth every hour or so, for at least the next couple weeks, or until whenever he decides to start eating again on his own.
*In the morning and evening of most large American cities (especially those surrounded by plenty of suburb), when everyone is driving their cars to their 9-5 jobs, there are simply too many vehicles on the highway for the lane capacity. You get on the highway at the nearest entrance, and proceed to average 15mph the entire distance from your suburban home to the downtown city center where you work, frequently coming to a complete stop, never going more than 25mph at the most.
In that situation, traffic is going to go slow, no matter what.
That isn't the type of traffic jam I'm talking about.
There is also another type of traffic back up. The kind that happens in moderate traffic. Everyone slows down, sometimes even to a complete stop, and then a few hundred feet later, you are moving again at 50, 60, 70mph, as if nothing happened.
Sometimes this happens because there is the aftermath of a crash in the shoulder, or even across the divider on the opposite shoulder of the oncoming lane, and all the drivers feel it is very important for them to take a good look at it, because humans are just like that. Other times its because someone is getting a traffic ticket, and, even though the cop is clearly busy at the moment, people imagine they are more likely to be caught speeding if the can see a police car.
But most often, these slow downs happen for no apparent reason at all. You get to the front of it, and cars are accelerating just as suddenly as they slowed down.
Sometimes traffic pulses like this, fast - slow - fast - slow - fast - slow for miles. In some places, not quite as dense as in the first example above, the daily commute does this pulse jam every single day.
When you find yourself in this situation, the choices you make can either make it better, or they can make it worse. If you are reading this, there is a decent chance you are one of the few who makes it better already - but if you are like most people, there is a much better chance you are making it worse.
In fact, if everyone realized what I'm about to explain, and acted appropriately, those slowdowns would never happen in the first place, but, of course, most people don't know any better, so its hard to hold it against them.
At least once you have finished reading this, there will be one more person who understands whats going on, and makes it better instead of worse.
The easiest way to understand how individual actions make the backup better or worse is with an analogy.
Lets say you are in a crowd, and for some reason everyone wants to go through a doorway as quickly as possible (the iconic burning theater, perhaps, or maybe just a Black Friday sale).
Each individual is acting as an independent free agent, and each wants their own personal speed to be as fast as possible.
What happens?
Everyone rushes the door, and they get stuck on each other as they try to squeeze through all at once. In extreme cases people get trampled, occasionally fatally, but even if everyone stays on their feet, the chaos amplifies the bottleneck and it takes an even longer time for everyone to get through.
Now consider an equally large crowd, but imagine they consist of a highly trained military company. When the fire alarm goes off, instead of each individual going straight for the door and attempting to shove each other out of the way, they all immediately form a single file line down the center of the room, each taking their place based on where they started, no one "cuts in line", everyone moves at a quick but controlled pace and never any faster than the person in front of them.
In the second scenario the very last person to go through the door gets through faster than the middle person in the free-for-all scenario.
What has changed? Each individual is moving a little bit slower, they all give each other a little more space, and no one runs around to the edge of the door to try to squeeze in from the side. The exact things that people acting as individuals do to try to optimize their own individual escape time are what cause them to get stuck on each other and, paradoxically, means they and everyone else gets out slower.
Researchers have looked at this phenomenon of "more haste, less speed":
The desire for speed overwhelms the desire to avoid collision and the blob people jam up against one another -- just as salt can jam the shaker even though the hole is bigger than the largest grain. The room takes longer to empty even though everyone tries to move faster -- handfuls of people escape in bursts between clogging events.
You can see something analogous on the highways everyday. Drivers attempt to go as fast as possible at all times, even when there are other cars ahead of them. Many tend to drive as close as possible to the car ahead, much closer than the recommended 2-3 second rule from drivers-ed class. When coming up on a line of stopped cars ahead, they will keep a foot on the accelerator as long as they possibly can before hitting the brakes hard just in time to prevent impact. And any time one lane is temporarily going slightly faster than the one they are in, they pull into it to gain one or two car lengths over those around them.
The overly aggressive drivers are obvious.
But almost everyone contributes, if to a lesser extent, to the same general phenomenon. Say every car is as close as is safe to the car ahead, in every lane, and everyone is moving at a constant rate. Now what happens if one car wants to change lanes? Since the cars are all as close as can be already, there is no possible way that the car can change lanes smoothly, because someone is going to have to slow to let them in, and they will have to slow to make the merge. Now the following cars in both lanes have to brake. And since the cars behind them were already as close as possible to them, those cars also have to brake. And since the cars behind them... you get the idea... the stopped cars now travels back through the traffic in a wave.
Now the same scenario - except the drivers are self-regulating like our military company escaping the burning theater: each car leaves a gap from the car ahead of them large enough that another car can safely merge in front of them.
Now when a car inevitably needs to change lanes, they can do so without slowing down, and without making the car behind them slow down. They and the car behind them will want to reopen the gap that they just filled, but this can be done gradually over time, with only minor adjustments to speed, and the wave of stopped cars never occurs.
Traffic engineers can control individual driver behavior by putting in deliberate bottlenecks, called metering lights - the kind found at toll plazas and some on-ramps, where everyone is supposed to wait just a couple seconds before they merge with traffic. Everyone ends up on the highway, but that moment of waiting forces everyone to space themselves out, and even though you had to wait, it is more than made up for by higher average speeds for everyone - including you.
Sometimes you can even see a similar effect from lane closures or rubbernecking - a section of highway that is moderately backed-up everyday, but on one occasion has a lane closed for construction or due to an accident, if its near the beginning of your trip, occasionally has you get to your destination faster than usual. As the cars slow down for the bottleneck, and then reach the end and start to accelerate one at a time, they spread themselves out, just like a metering light would have done.
An identical effect is seen with the crowd of pedestrians trying to get through a doorway; putting an obstacle in the way of the exit actually makes the crowd get though it faster.
Most fire codes require that the pathway to an emergency exit be kept wide open, but according to researchers in Japan, placing an obstruction next to an exit may actually help crowds of people to get out of a room more efficiently.
Researchers found that when people bottleneck near an exit, they start to jostle each other for position. The jostling acts much like friction, slowing down the rate at which people can exit. Introducing a strategically-placed obstacle near the exit can reduce the number of people pushing for the exit, speeding up the rate at which people can pass through.
"We found that we can evacuate faster if we put an obstacle at the suitable position in front of the exit," said Daichi Yanagisawa, who lead the study from the University of Tokyo in Japan.
Even without metering lights, though, you can make a conscious choice to help traffic you are in move more smoothly.
Pay attention to the road ahead. If you see an ocean of brake lights up ahead, take your foot off the accelerator. There is no point in racing to be the first to come to a stop. Resist the urge to change lanes every time one appears to be going slightly faster, unless you have enough space that you can do it without anyone having to slow down for you. Leave a big enough gap between you and the car ahead of you that someone else could safely merge in front of you without you having to slow down. That applies at any speed, from stop and crawl to over the posted limit** - not only will it smooth out traffic flow, it will also reduce your chances of being involved in a collision, not to mention reduce other people's road rage. No one can cut you off if you choose to slow down and let them in.
That means people will get it front of you.
And that's ok.
At as slow as 10mph, one car length costs you all of one second. At 35 it costs you one third of one second. Big freggin deal! Let 50 cars get in front of you on a trip with a 45mph average speed, and you get where you are going all of 30 seconds later than you would have had you made sure to be the one to go first.
Not only have you made 50 people a little happier, but you have helped traffic flow a little better for all the people behind you, all the way back down the highway.
Better still, when you are coming up to one of those pointless braking waves, and you start slowing down well in advance, often times it will have completely cleared itself up by the time you get to where it was. Which means by simply taking your foot off the accelerator, you never have to brake at all. By avoiding coming to a complete stop, your average speed ends up being higher! Its quite like timing traffic lights - if you try to go faster than the timed lights are designed for, you have to stop for the red, and someone driving at the speed limit will pass you just as it turns green again while you are accelerating from a stand still.
And if driving with less pointless starting and stopping, less stress, and helping to clear up traffic jams wasn't enough, this also happens to be the best way to minimize fuel when driving in traffic, so you save cash too, along with the environment and America's energy independence.
Next time you are driving, think about this essay. When someone exits in front of you, leaving a huge gap between you and the next car, don't rush to catch up. When you are entering the highway, and the on-ramp is clear but the merging lane is slow, don't stay on the on-ramp until the very last second and then cross over the solid white line in an attempt to pass as many other cars as possible. You are saving yourself a negligible amount of time, probably less than a second, but you are creating a braking wave that will snarl the traffic behind you potentially for miles. Think about the orderly single file line, and how much faster everyone exits the building. Everyone else is going to drive how they are going to drive, but at least you won't be making it worse. And who knows, if enough of us start doing it, a few others might just take notice, and sooner or later stop and go traffic waves will simply cease to exist.
I was at a party yesterday, and I was talking about who knows what, and, I guess maybe because I have an "educated" accent, or whatever, I really have no idea why, she commented that she was surprised I hadn't gone into some field of science.
And I mentioned that I had been expecting to in high school, I had interned in microbiology and biotech labs, focused mainly on science classes in high school and college, got associate degrees in biology and earth science - but then, by random acts of fate, I had ended up doing semi-skilled manual labor which afforded me not only decent money, but an extremely flexible schedule and the ability to be my own boss. I said I still satiated that side of my mind with plenty of reading, and occasional writing.
She asked where I wrote, whether it was just for myself - basically just this blog, and given the size of it's readership, yeah, pretty much just for myself. and what topics I wrote about, and I tried to think of all the various things I've covered.
She asked what they all have in common.
Nothing really, other than I find them interesting. And I find of lot of things interesting. The world is a vast and complicated place. reality is fascinating. I really can not comprehend how so many people can willingly specialize, focus on just one area of human knowledge, when there is just so much else out there. I'm much more interested in understanding a little about everything than everything about a little.
So, yeah, my blog has no theme. Probably why I will never be able to generate any significant readership. People subscribe to stuff that focuses on what interests them, and mine doesn't focus on anything.
She insisted that there must be some angle where a common theme could be found. She said that in what she did, there were always commonalities emerging, even when they weren't obvious at first.
We kept talking more, I elaborated slightly on a few posts, she suggested that maybe challenging preconceptions might be a consistent thing, and then I realized, duh! it's right there in the header of the blog.
Nothing inspires me to write - to really write, something in depth and well thought out, with perhaps hours of research and weeks of drafting in my head - like something where I find millions of people hold a particular piece of "common wisdom" which just happens to be completely wrong.
But I learned something recently: People are stubborn. I mean, like, really stubborn.
No surprise, right, but the extent of it is.
Its not just rejecting arguments that you don't already agree with. We humans have a tendency, even in the face of independent evidence or clear factual data, to believe our wrong beliefs EVEN HARDER when they are challenged.
That certainly isn't encouraging in terms of my chances of changing anyone's mind about anything!
mandatory reading before you can read any of the more potentially controversial things I've written. Except of course that there is no way for me to enforce it.
Well, read it anyway. And be aware of it, not just when you're reading what I write, but all the time, in day-to-day life, and whenever you argue with anyone. You can go a long way to overriding your own cognitive biases, if only you are aware of them. You will make yourself smarter, and by so doing, be able to make your own life better in every way, forever.
You may still disagree with me on all sorts of stuff. But, at least if you approach it with a truly open mind, you will disagree for the right reasons.
I don't generally see a lot of ads, thanks to AdBlock on the computer and a RePlayTV unit that automatically skips them when I watch an occasional show, but between Hulu, the few that get past the RePlay's filters, and billboards, I can't seem to escape them entirely. Which is fine, they are paying for me to have free content, some of them are entertaining, and every once in a great while actually informative.
But there are 3 out right now which grate against me so severely that the only way I'm going to be able to stop ranting in my own head about them is to rant on the internet.
They are deliberately relying on consumer's ignorance in order to try to convey a message which simply isn't there - the facts are technically accurate, but the implication is actually the exact opposite of reality.
1) The new milk campaign, attempting to discredit soy milk:
They list a bunch of scary sounding "chemicals" that soy milk contains, to contrast with cow milk, which according to the ingredient list has only one ingredient: "milk". Never mind that the list of scary sounding chemicals they list consists almost entirely of vitamins and minerals which are actually quite healthy, or neutral at worst.
So, in the interest of fairness, here are some scary sounding chemicals that are present in cow's milk:
Golly. Don't all those chemicals sound unknown, and therefor scary?
*(which is a TRANSfat omg!!!!!!!! - but wait, aren't transfats all man-made and added by the evil food industry???? What? Some transfats are naturally occurring? How can that be, when everything natural is good and healthy, and all transfats are devil food??)
2) 5-hour energy:
73% "said they would recommend a low-calorie energy supplements to their healthy patients who used energy supplements. 73%!" Wow! That's a C- grade. Ok, so never mind that 73% is not particularly impressive.
Never mind that if it has no calories it has no actual energy. It may make you feel energetic, but the human body gets its energy from calories, not stimulants. (Don't believe it, try going on a fast where you consume nothing but cocaine for a few months)
And never mind that almost 1/2 the doctors they tried to survey refused to participate in the first place...
They worded it pretty carefully. Sounds like they handed out a survey that said "if you had a patient who was determined to take an energy supplement, would you recommend that it be low calorie?" Well, sure, given that constraint, of course. Just like IF you have a patient that smokes, you might recommend that at the very least they smoke light, filtered cigarettes. That's not exactly an endorsement. And even with that particular wording, 27% still wouldn't recommend it. But wait - there's more! If you read the fine print, even among those who would recommend low calorie energy supplements to patients who are going to take energy supplements anyway, after reviewing the ingredients of the specific 5-Hour Energy brand, 45% of them would NOT recommend it! 45%!
So, assuming that the 1/2 of doctors who refused to dignify their survey with an answer would not have been impressed, you have 50% (number who answered at all) x 73% (number who said yes to low calorie) x 55% (number of those who said yes to the brand) = 20% who actually said they would recommend the product IF a person was dead-set on using an "energy supplement".
We can only assume that the number who would recommend it to a patient who wasn't already on legal stimulants is approximately 0%
3) No On Beverage Tax
This is a local one, but similar measures are being proposed all over. It isn't even a ballot measure yet, but the soda industry and retailers are fighting it preemptively. In theory it would tax beverages with added sugar by one penny an ounce.
The ad claims that it would "hit the city’s poorest residents and the elderly the hardest"
Because, you know, poor people and old people are legally mandated to drink nothing but soda. Or is it that their unique physiological properties make it that the empty calories in soda are actually a nutritional requirement?
Ah, I know - some people are SO poor that, not only aren't there supermarkets nearby with real juice, they don't have running water, so their only source of liquid is the soda they buy at the gas station.
Wait... what? Gas stations and corner stores sell not only 100% juice, but also bottled water? Hmm....
Whoa, whoa, whats that!? Running water is legally required in all rental units, including the projects and even homeless shelters, and many if not most renters don't actually pay for metered water? Are you saying all these poor people could actually be drinking water for FREE?
And even if one does pay metered rate for tap water, its cost is between one half to 5 cents a gallon? Now you are just being silly. That would mean that even without the tax, generic brand soda costs roughly 35 times as much as tap water for the exact same nutritional value. Gosh, so maybe drinking water would save more money than traveling to a city without a beverage tax to find cheap soda, as the ad campaign suggests is the only possible alternative.
I suppose its good that we have any truth in advertising laws at all, but I really think we need to take the next step and ban "technically accurate but deliberately deceptive and misleading in it's implications" advertising as well.
The latest meme created by the political Right in order to attempt to justify massive wealth inequality in America, a talking point for the middle class to use, but even more so a subtle reminder to them that they should be grateful towards their social superiors.
It is effective in its simplicity, as good memes and talking points should be. It takes so much for granted that it appears to be impossible to counter – it is in fact an accurate statement – so there is no equally simple one-liner that can refute it. Each and everyone of the underlying concepts that it relies on are false, and so to show the irrelevance of the statement to the issue at hand requires actually delving into and dissecting the assumptions it makes. That is generally not practical in casual conversation, nor on a heavily time restricted televised debate.
But I have as much space as I want here, so, since I have yet to see a thorough analysis of this –frankly – ridiculous statement, I will do so myself, right now:
1)Rich vs. poor is a false dichotomy. “Poor” means those living near or below the federal poverty level, which is roughly $10,000 per person in a household. This is only about the bottom 10-20% of the population.
Above them is the middle class. They include not only 9-5 workers, but most of the self-employed, and a large percentage of those who own small businesses.
Above them is the “rich” – the much talked about “1%” – who have 6-digit incomes, and a couple million in assets. Some small businesses are also owned by the rich.
Above them is the super rich. They do not belong in the same category as the merely “rich”. These are the billionaires. They have so much wealth in existing assets that they could go the rest of their lives without earning another dollar, live lavishly with limos, butlers, yachts, and private security, and still leave trust funds large enough that their children never need to work a day in their lives either. These people are not the 1%. They are the 0.01%. There are only a few hundred of them. As an interesting side-note, while a fairly large chunk of the rich actually got rich by working hard, living cheap, saving their excess income and investing it wisely, nearly half of the super rich got their money by inheriting it.
2)The person who owns a business does not “create” the positions they hire for. The only way that would be true is if people who had too much money started hiring people to dig holes in their back yards, and then hiring others to fill those holes in again. That doesn’t happen. The jobs they hire for are jobs that needed doing. It is the economy – and ultimately consumers, who drive demand – that actually create the need for jobs to be filled. Consumers consist primarily of the middle class. They are creating their own jobs. What form those jobs take can vary. A century ago the vast majority of those jobs would have been in the form of individual family businesses, mostly with just one location, which grew bigger than the family could handle, so they began hiring a workforce. Whether you have a mom & pop corner store, a family restaurant, and an independent coffee shop, or you have a WalMart, a McDonald’s, and a Starbucks, either way the exact same jobs exist. The corporations didn’t “create” any of those jobs, nor did they “give” them to their employees. They simply took over for the small businesses that existed before they arrived. As times has gone on, more and more small businesses have closed as they have been unable to compete with (or bought out by) larger companies.
3)Even with the massive growth of nation-wide and international corporations and the reduction in the small businesses they have displaced, it is still true that 50% of all jobs are created by small business. As noted above, small business is owned by either the middle class or the merely “rich” (as opposed to the super-rich). Small business, by definition, is not nation-wide, and is not a corporation. In other words, not only are major corporations not creating new jobs, they aren’t even hosting ½ the jobs that do exist.
4)In fact, one of the main reasons large business and corporations have a competitive advantage over small business is because of the fact that they are so good at eliminating jobs! There are three main forces that cause the need for American labor to shrink - and all three have become so common that they rarely get talked about any more, even though all three were recognized as problems for the American worker while they first began to develop. They have become so wide-spread and common that we just take them for granted now, but they are bigger problems now than they used to be, and they are the root cause of our current unemployment.
a.Outsourcing – obviously if a company moves its production to another country (almost always for cheaper labor) that means there is less need for workers here, and people get laid off. This used to mean opening factories in other countries, but it now includes a lot of phone support and software development as well.
b.Technology – whether its robots replacing factory workers, computers replacing accountants, RFID toll readers replacing human collectors, or self-check-out replacing cashiers, technology tends to have the affect of eliminating jobs.
c.Consolidation – when one corporation buys out another, they frequently have multiple positions being filled by different people from each of the original companies. One of them is now redundant, and so people get laid off.
5)All three of the previous factors have a couple things in common. One is that it reduces the necessary American workforce, which causes overall unemployment to rise. Another is that all three benefit the company or corporation doing it – they have the same (or greater) output, but their labor costs are reduced, therefore their overall profits increase. Far from assisting the American middle-class by providing jobs, they literally benefit directly from deliberately eliminating jobs. As a bonus, as unemployment rises, competition for jobs increases, which allows employers to lower wages (or reduces cost-of-living increases, which amounts to the same thing) which pushes wages down for all jobs. Again, benefiting the corporation at the expense of the workers. There is one more important thing they have in common – they all require significant capital to undertake. Building a brand new factory overseas is not something a one location family owned business with a handful of employees has the resources to do. Buying state-of-the-art robots to run a factory in the US requires too much spare cash for a small business to make the switch. Buying out all of ones competition, even if its at a loss, can be a very expensive undertaking. There are obviously going to be individual exceptions, but in general these are all things which large companies are likely to do, and which small business is not likely to do.
6)Giant companies are most likely either owned by the super-rich, or they are corporations. Corporations are technically owned by all of their share-holders, which can include anyone with a stock portfolio (much of the middle class). However, shareholders get minimal input into the company. All the shareholders are doing is lending the company their money to use as capital. The decisions of what to do with that money are made by the “Preferred” Shareholders, the board of directors, and most of all by the CEO. These are the people calling the shots, and they are the ones whose job it is to eliminate jobs, thereby increasing profits. So while big business is hosting ½ the jobs purely because of their massive overwhelming size and influence, and having run most of the independents out of business, they are simultaneously responsible for eliminating all of the positions which used to exist, and would still if they weren’t around.
7)As noted above, the thing that allows them to find cheaper ways to replace American workers is excess capital. Tax breaks to big business and stock investment increases their excess capital. And so, ironically, as the middle class votes for policies and politicians that benefit big business with the reasoning that it will come back to them in the form of employment, they are actually helping to eliminate their own jobs, while at the same time creating a government deficit, which ultimately they will pay for, in the form of higher taxes, reduced services (and “services” doesn’t just mean “welfare”; it means roads, highways and bridges, communication networks, clean water, police to combat crime, firefighters to combat fire, elections that aren’t fixed, mosquito abatement, corruption-free court systems, prisons… all that stuff that makes modern civilization work) – or both higher taxes AND reduced services. All to help out the very people in society who need the least help – the handful of incomprehensibly wealthy people who between them hold enough wealth to pay down the entire US debt – not just the deficit, the entire debt – while still leaving all of them millionaires.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to condense all of that into a snappy one-liner come-back, and since American’s as a whole have shunned intellectuallyness and edumacation, one-liners is what sticks – “a poor person never gave me a job” will stick. And we as a people will continue voting for politicians and policies that allow corporations to do whatever they want, not realizing that what they want is to give the people the ugly end of the shaft. I guess maybe as long as we are going to turn to edutainment for news and talk radio commentators for political and economic analysis, we are just getting what we deserve. Hopefully as our economy collapses around us it will shake the middle class to their senses, and we can start to build a new with a focus on benefiting US citizens as a people instead of profit for profits’ sake when we finally emerge from the rubble.
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:
(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:
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...
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(...this pause is me waiting for you to finish watching...)
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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
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.
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:
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:
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...
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.
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:
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.
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):
(Don't skip this one. Its less than one minute long, and you'll be tested on it in a second)
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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.
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."
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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]
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"
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"
(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?
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.
