Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer
This is a very interesting piece for the uninitiated to study. New Yorker Magazine is a pseudo-elitist publication that serves as a stalking horse of the intelligentsia to see just how far over everyone’s eyes they are able to pull the wool. If you’ve never read a piece in this manner before, pretend that rather than reading a fluffy piece on socio-dynamics in a glossy magazine you are about to walk down a dark alley late at night. Put on your skeptical glasses and see if you can’t discern within the first few sentences where you are being led, and what they are trying to sell you.
The title alone should do it for even the amateur sleuth because it states something that is absolutely false as if it were in fact a primary truth. We learn most everything we know from being shown facts; water is wet, fire is hot, eating satisfies hunger. Fact, fact, fact. If someone’s mind hasn’t been changed from the proper application of facts, by all means, dial 911, they are either dead or at risk.
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.
As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.
In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.
“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.
Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.
The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?
In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.
Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.
Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.
The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.
If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”
Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.
A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.
In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.
This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.
Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”
Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.
Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?
In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)
Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.
“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)
Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.
“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.
Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”
One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.
In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)
The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.
The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”
“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.
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Good gravy, Hard-to-unscramble Farmer. I doubt if I can find a ladder long enough to rise up to your level ! I’ll try, though. I have not yet finished this, but when I read the following, I wanted to make a quick response:
“For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action.”
‘Behold, for today a savior is born in Bethlehem’
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum- Bethlehem, Pa., that is……and Jewish no less !
And the crowd cheered…….Bernie, Bernie, Bernie……brought to you by FOX-in-the-henhouse news
If I’m at all tracking this so far, I believe this may be evidence of what your post is referring to ?
ordo ab sicario, The point of the article is that people are basically stupid and would still drag their knuckles if geniuses weren’t born every thousand years to help them walk upright. He then brings up several examples of how people apply their backwards thinking to everyday problems and how they are no better at times than a dog that falls for the ball toss fakeout.
Hahaha, I like that, sicario-nated would probably be more accurate. I thought it was a good movie, or was it a documentary?
Maybe I did grasp a bit more than I thought. That’s kinda what I was getting at with the post I made. First, we were stupid (includes myself at the forefront) enough to buy into the Trump MAGA, just as those before bought hope-n-change…..now a jooish saviour comes on the scene. As long as Murikan citizens buy into the promises of blood sucking parasitical politicians, the band plays on.
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum- CHAOS is the goal, and they’re gonna get there.
Facts didn’t matter with the Nuremberg trials either…
Nuremberg was a court with “no rules”. Normal “rules of evidence” were suspended. Even a few judges remarked that it was a “kangaroo court”. Those Germans who “testified” did so under duress as they were tortured, even having their testicles smashed by jewish inquisitors.
Today’s equivalent to the Nuremberg court is the defective court doctrine of “judicial notice” which states that evidence favorable to the defense cannot be introduced into the court record if it goes against “commonly accepted beliefs” even if these beliefs can be proven to be false.
This automatically puts defendants in “holocaust revisionism” cases at a disadvantage as they cannot mount a proper defense by introducing evidence favorable to their case as it goes against “commonly accepted beliefs”.
Monika Schaefer, Ursula Haverbeck, Sylvia Stolz, and others have been convicted of “holohohoax heresy” and given prison terms, being unable to introduce the TRUTH into the court record.
Holocaustianity is the new “state religion” from which no deviation from the lies and fabrications is permitted.
This made me think of how a set of people come to believe in their divine rights, so to speak. Royalty will tell their children they are special and right no matter what. Unless, that is, it goes against staying special. Each successive generation will become more and more divine even up to becoming a living God.
I saw this same article the other day. It certainly reflects what we see every day on TBP, where fact driven analysis seems to be giving way to pre-established narrative. This world-wide trend does not bode well.
I knew we would find a subscriber to the magazine!
My mind’s made up by the way that I feel
There’s no beginning, there’ll be no end
Cause on my Trump you can depend
OK, what is 15 million minus 6 million?
Wow, HF, I waded through that article, I really did, and came out on empty. WTF. I haven’t watched the telly in decades, get my info from friends, books and the net and wonder just how efficient the brain washing of the citizens
has become. Freud’s nephew discovered the powers of persuasion a while ago and his followers have, I would guess, refined the techniques. I got lost in the various subterfuges of the studies. Humans are social, herd-like animals. We go insane and die in solitary confinement. We are easily led to believe in and follow sociopaths, from Hitler and Stalin to Jim Jones. Wading through the BS is getting to be too much for my old legs.
Just so.
In summary: Orange man bad …
Negroes good.
The only worthwhile things ever presnted in this mag-rag were (1) most of its cartoons and (2) the wonderful cover showing the US viewing west from a NYC perspective. #2 is God-awfully evident in the reasoning this article takes.
Nobody reads (or understands) Aristotle’s Rhetoric, so the logical sleight of hand will be missed by many (most?)
Arrogantly beguiling sophistry all the way through.
It would have been interesting to see them point all that high-powered acumen toward the Russia investigation, ya know?
Also, the article brought to mind the Dunning-Kruger Effect versus Imposter Syndrome.
“…incomplete understanding is empowering…”
Personal fave from the article.
Which is just another way of saying: “Ignorance is Strength”.
Isaiah 5:20 says:
‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’
Great catch on that.
Well, yes.
I share your attitude towards the NYer (subscribed to it back in the go-go eighties when I was a yuppie) and its smug tendentiousness… but I don’t see what’s really wrong with this article at its core, since they are reporting on a true phenomenon that cuts both ways.
Example: after the Cruz school shooting in FL, I was talking to a bunch of uber-liberal Vermont types. They were verklempt over the “courage” and “leadership” shown by the activist anti-gun students in the wake of that event.. “so empowering!” I told them that in no way was that activism spontaneous on the part of the students, that David Hogg’s dad was FBI, his mom CNN, and that an organized group of adults were using these kids as part of a larger agenda. To me, these were facts, but to my interlocutors, they were heresy! How could I not beleeeeeeive in the power of loooove!?!?
Their incomplete understanding empowered them, because to just be a fool who had been duped by the media on this or any number of similar occasions was not something psychologically available to them.
===
Another instance of incomplete understanding being empowering is the reliance of many at TBP on religious explanations for the way the world is. Clearly there is no cosmic individual directing our affairs on earth, nor will we enjoy an afterlife of which we will be conscious.. and clearly the simplest answer to the absolute convictions of believers in a thousand different gods is that not a one is true (I would call this a fact, since there is no evidence contrary to it). But tell people the FACT that their religion is made-up and they resist that conclusion: their incomplete understanding empowers them. To think that you have a connection to infinite power (even if you are abject in its regard) gives people a sense of identity, and value, even if this value is not based in reality! Actually, BECAUSE this value is not based in reality, is more like it…
“Clearly there is no cosmic individual directing our affairs on earth, nor will we enjoy an afterlife of which we will be conscious.. and clearly the simplest answer to the absolute convictions of believers in a thousand different gods is that not a one is true (I would call this a fact, since there is no evidence contrary to it).”
This is exactly the type of reasonable sounding argument that is not, in fact, logical in the least. To say that since people believe in a thousand different gods, is nonsense. People live and have always lived on this tiny blue dot in a vast and ancient cosmos. Their beliefs have absolutely no effect on the underlying structure of existence. So there is a fundamental logical disconnect in your statements. The logical divergence occurs in conflating the terms religion, God and faith. Watch any “debate” on this topic and you will see that these terms are never separated, even though they apply over vastly different domains. Nothing that has or ever will happen on Earth says anything about the fundamental nature of the Cosmos, period. So when you say “no cosmic individual”, you are least on some logical ground, because whatever God may (or may not) be, anthropomorphizing such is an absurd assumption and this is what religions tend to do. It is also what astrophysics tends to do, but that is a different post.
Again, and yet again: our ignorance is infinite. The nature of things is beyond us. But to assume that everything is rational because “science” is a mistake.
The real question is Accident vs. Purpose. This applies at all levels of analysis, from the tiniest individual bit of transcendence to the foundation of all things.
If Accident, then every single event in all cosmic history MUST be entirely and equally random. Logical MUST and incontrovertible.
If not, well then everything is shrouded in mystery with a few tiny kernels of rational truth peaking out here and there.
To me, the latter seems more likely to be the way of things. A position I can easily hold and still not be beholden to some silly superstition. Which of course, is another fallacy thrown out willy-nilly by new atheist who completely miss the purpose and utility of religion from an evolutionary standpoint, but again, that is a topic for another rant.
Of course I don’t miss the purpose and utility of religion, but that doesn’t make religious beliefs truthful or logical in and of themselves.
We don’t know everything about physics, it’s true, but as HRob and HSF said, the path towards finding out the truth tends to be along lines which are reproducible through continual experimentation and testing of hypotheses.
“Every event in cosmic history must be equally random”.. Where do you get that?
Accident vs. Purpose on the scale of the universe.. what makes anything an “accident”? That’s a loaded word, as is the word, “purpose”. Those are human-centered words. If you dropped a glass and it broke, that’s an “accident”.. you didn’t “purposefully” break it. But that doesn’t mean there was no cause.. maybe your hands were wet or greasy.. There was a REASON, just not a human-driven one. That’s how I think of the universe.
Some physicists are now questioning the existence of time itself. Which would challenge even those banal notions of cause and effect. The Cause and the Effect would be unified and ever-present, I suppose (have not read up a lot on this, but it’s interesting to contemplate).
You are making my main point. “There was a REASON, just not a human-driven one. That’s how I think of the universe” Was there? How would you describe a REASON that caused everything to BE?
I get the loaded word notion, but that is the limitation of semantics, purpose and accident are the best I’ve got. It is along the lines of Einstein’s quote: “You must either believe everything is a miracle or nothing is.” This is not an assertion of faith or lack thereof, it is setting up a logical framework. If we take the notion of the Big Bang at face value…at some point in the past there was nothing and then there was something/everything. So, either that was the CAUSE that began all effects (what I mean by an accidental universe) OR Creation is a process that continues. If the first, there is nothing left to think about…everything is just as deterministic as a golf ball in flight. If the second, well there is something else going on…a Reason, a purpose, God. Again, the semantics blur away boundaries. But something happened and no we’re here is a solid place to start. The question is are we part of the effect or part of some eternal process. If the latter, the view I hold, I can’t say with any certainty things like: Clearly there is no cosmic individual directing our affairs on earth, nor will we enjoy an afterlife of which we will be conscious.” Nothing on this level of analysis is “clear.”
Yes, you’re right in that “REASON” is also a loaded word! Maybe “precedent”? “Precursor”? “pre-existing condition”..?
“You must either believe everything is a miracle or nothing is.” Indeed, and I would say, nothing. It’s all here right in front of us, how can it be “miraculous”?
“Big Bang at face value”.. not sure I ascribe to the BB unless as one leg of a pulsing cycle. But when you say, “EITHER there was an accidental cause OR there is a continuing process of Creation (not sure if you mean via a Creator)”.. that seems insufficient to me. Not blaming you in particular, since this is the canonical choice. What if there is no “cause” and no “creation”? We’re just in the midst of an ongoing situation exchanging matter for energy. That’s a third option.
I could re-phrase my remarks to say “there is absolutely nothing outside of human fantasy to indicate the existence of a cosmic creator-individual, metaphysical spirits of any kind, or the persistence of human souls in an afterlife”. Is that better? I’m hard-pressed to imagine anyone who could argue with that statement.
I personally have far to incomplete definitions of spirits, souls, life, afterlife or fantasy to say such a thing. I don’t know what this thing is. At it’s heart is mystery. I have questions, that is all.
I understand the Laws of Thermodynamics well, but I don’t know why they exist, just as I understand the Fundamental Forces, but not why they exist, nor am I convinced that they are truly fundamental. Things just always seem to Turtle all the way down.
Some physicists are now questioning the existence of time itself.
Yeah, well, some journalists are questioning the existence of truth.
What does that prove?
I question your sanity, as do others.
Would you now check in to your local madhouse?
Of course, you misunderstand the purpose of their questioning.
It is sometimes a good practice to start with a question.
It is usually women who start with a conclusion.
What conclusion? I am merely stating a fact: “Some physicists are now questioning the existence of time itself.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-debate-over-the-physics-of-time-20160719/
https://www.thoughtco.com/does-time-really-exist-2699430
https://www.space.com/29859-the-illusion-of-time.html
https://futurism.com/rethinking-space-time-nature/
This is a 30-second Google.. I haven’t read any of these… I just know the question is out there. I am agnostic about it. I think I can muddle along without becoming a public charge, at least for now.
THANKS for the most stimulating article, Sir HSF, and THANKS to Uncola for the reference to the Dunning -Kruger reference. This collection of quotes from old quite smart folks at the bottom is relevant.
Enjoy hopefully.
Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was formulated in 1999, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority has been known throughout history and identified by intellectuals. A sampling of their comments includes:
Confucius (551–479 BC), who said, “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”.[6]
The philosopher Socrates (470–399 BC), who interpreted a prophecy from the Delphic oracle, said that he was wise despite feeling that he did not fully understand anything, as the wisdom of being aware that he knew nothing.
Playwright William Shakespeare (1564–1616), who said, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” (As You Like It, V. i.)[24]
The poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), who wrote in An Essay on Criticism, 1709: “A little learning is a dangerous thing”
Henry Fielding (1707–1754), who, in the novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, wrote: “For men of true learning, and almost universal knowledge, always compassionate [pity] the ignorance of others; but fellows who excel in some little, low, contemptible art, are always certain to despise those who are unacquainted with that art.”
The naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”[2]
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who wrote in Human, All Too Human (aphorism 483), “The Enemies of Truth. — Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”[25]
W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), who, in the poem The Second Coming, said: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”[14]
The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who said, “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”[14]
Very well done & thank you.
Excellent article Hardscrabble.
“These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon.”
This is no experiment. It is hardcore planning with specific objectives. Anytime you watch a program, read an article or even listen to a song, you are being programmed without your knowledge. I might add that it seems to be working quite well on the mostly ignorant America. My problem is that I have never been able to put my finger on who “exactly” is orchestrating this whole thing so your always unsure of who your enemy is, and they are definitely your enemy.
Perhaps for those who don’t get it, duckduckgo Edward Bernay and get his perspective on human programming
I don’t entirely disagree, but I think only a small percentage needs to be “programmed”, and the rest is self-programming.
It is interesting how the author (E. Kolbert) of this article wrapped her particular brand of political propaganda in the gossamer facade of psychological “scholarly” credibility; psychology is, after all, the youngest of the “sciences”, and there remain many schools of thought, and every one of them can support its need for grants. But they have yet to demonstrate that 2 + 2 = 4. That is, as a “science”, it remains VERY subjective. So she uses “credibility” to disguise the fact that some or all of her argument is bullsh*t. This is a hit-piece (SHAME ON YOU, TRUMPSTERS), nothing more. Anyway . . . If I took her words and edited her opinions out, inserted my own from the point (oh what randomness might I choose) that she started cheer-leading for vaccines and continued to put my opinions in place of hers through the rest of the article, I bet, SINCE SHE CITED THE STUDIES TO MAKE HER (and my) POINT (assuming they are real to begin with), that she would recognize the propaganda for what it is. And, sort of like Ursel poses in his comment, to me, this drivel proves that the adjective “opinionated” is no substitute for “understanding”.
Well, the thesis definitely would explain why people continue to pay for The New Yorker despite all the evidence that it is, in fact, worthless for anything other than confirmation bias.
toilet paper?
Too shiny.
When I was in college and somewhat naive
I got taught by professors what not to believe
But I’ve set childlike things down because I’ve grown old
To take up an Armor which gleams like fine gold
The Truth! How it shields me! From pincers of hate
and banalities of evil which seek me of late
This cruel month of April: the crisis of spring
with the winds still carrying winter’s chill sting… (As far as I got, but you can see where I’m trying to go with it but sometimes, the pacing gets off. Some poets will just put in the “intent” to hold the place until they come up with exactly the right word that carries the exact right sentiment. Those poems never get written.)
Writing poetry was once considered a good exercise for overactive children who liked to play with words like they liked to play with blocks. It forced them to open up things called Books and search for meaning. Now all they need do is ask.
Hmmm…. I’ve been waxing poetical these past few days, due to opening a big box of memories that included that lovely Liberty decoration I repainted and is not sitting on my woodstove in the corner contemplating where it wants to hang in my home.
Good day to you, Mr. Hardscrambled Farmer. I hope to have Admin change my writin’ name here and that way I might be able to post something short and simple for my father and his buddies, perhaps around Memorial Day. Maybe an old friend’s family might, just might, hear about their father being “mentioned” in an article far away in another place and time.
I know you are still a bit lame but I suspect your shoulders are very strong.
Oh, I’m thinking Madam Grooch, LGR… It accomplishes three things: Tribute to my father, who called my mother “the Madam” when he was being “serious joe” and tribute to Nick’s Poppa, whom his wife and I lovingly called Grooch … and… wait for it… wait for it…
It will force El Coyote to call me Ma’am. I have decided my female Pyrenese will wear a red rope. Little Miss Melissa is moving in with the goats soon (her training was delayed due to inclement weather and owner.) and will be promoted to “Ma’am, yes Ma’am.”
The nannies are Bess, Nell, and Little Bitty. The wethered one is stew. That is not his name; it is his destiny.
Sure, April is a cruel month, teasing us with sunshine and Hope and raining down pellets of ice on our daily trek to the throne.
But, if it helps those I hope it helps, Lord, I know May Day is coming and I trust and obey.
Farmer… facts never change minds. It is how people feel about the facts which impacts reasoning. Changing how people FEEL about the facts is what Bernays and his ilk were and are all about.
The elephant in the room is Horton, who knows that people are people no matter how small.
Maggie! Did you even bother to read what HSF spent all that time working on or is this really just all about you?
He posted an article, if you had read it, you’d know it wasn’t his work. Dumbass.
No shit beaner.
Your just jealous cause Mama G sent me a can of refrieds. You will have to drag your dead ass to Taco Hell for a Deluxe Burrito to drown your sorrows.
The box is supposed to arrive tomorrow. The lady on the hill over “there” with all the kids runs a home crafts business. She shipped it for me, although she was concerned about the big box of cans that rattle as if there are beans in there.
EC… I just looked for the “current” list of prices for the Bishop’s Kitchen items. They don’t appear to “do that” any longer. I know the last time my group went, we were told would be changes to the way they canned and sold the food…
I think your refried beans may very well be “rare and vintage.” The other beans in the box most definitely are… who in their right mind would put Negro Beans on a label? The same people who put Great Northern White Beans.
Your refried beans are brown with a hint of red schmooshed in… premixed and blended.
I am seriously shocked to see the entire outreach appears to be “gone.” Now, the discussion of charity is geared within the Mormon community. Are there any Mormon TBPers here?
What happened to Thursday food storage and sales at the Bishop’s Kitchen?
https://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage/longer-term-food-supply?lang=eng&old=true
I call most women Ma’am. Sometimes, they are miffed. They don’t know I am being polite, they think I’m calling them an old lady with gray hair and a ruler in her hand.
Actually you call most women mom. But close enough.
Ya, mon.
Well, I don’t carry a ruler around here, but after my hair began breaking off in clumps, Nick just whacked it off short until I went to a hairdresser and she told me to leave it alone until it starts to look normal.
Perhaps M. Grooch, now that you’ve at least said Ma’am in my presence. A simple MG says it all.
Am serious about doing the work. The super novena may be over but we have not finished cleaning up the Lent.
As a matter of fact, my not being bitchy has been such a boon around here, I’ve extended it to Mother’s Day and maybe, for a few POWs I once met and loved, through Memorial Day.
We’ll see after that.
How much weight did I lose? Well, that shirt used to say “Build a Bridge Over It.”
As you can see, the “And Get” is now visible when it was overshadowed by DD. Now, it reads “Build a Bridge and Get OVER IT.”
And the tiny little booty shorts nobody over fifty should wear publicly slide off now, so I wear them over leggings. Thigh gap is thigh canyon and the booty shorts do a good job hiding what should not be visible on a 58-year-old woman whether she’s in Walmart or still down on the farm.
Either way, it is good advice if you can read between the lines.
“Build a Bridge and Get OVER IT.”
I think it is about time we all move forward.
And I always read the Farmer’s articles he writes himself and I usually skim the ones he links. But I’m sure he appreciates bloviating assholes patrolling the comments on his posts, being assholes. I would comment about that but I’m not being bitchy right now.
Oh, and you were sent the refried beans but only Stucky got any real toilet paper.
Why yes Maggie. Clearly it is all about you. Whoever you might be. It sure is getting crowded in that there brain. And I use the term loosely.
Does it make you feel like a big man to pick on Maggie?
Damn queers.
I’ve read this thing 3 times now, and it’s simply over my head. I guess I’ll just stick with my original comment.
Interestingly, I noticed the quote of the day:
“A great industrial nation is controlled by it’s system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world–no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”
— Woodrow Wilson
Enter Edward Bernays, and his uncle Sigmund…
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum-
“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
Woodrow Wilson served 1913-1921. So, a little over a hundred yrs. ago, and with the advancement of technology, the centralized control has only accelerated.
The New Yorker – is that the magazine that takes 3 people to figure out what the punchline of the cartoons mean? But, yes HSF, a deviously slanted article wrapped up in “science”.
I’d like to see what the results of the studies would be grouping the undergrads participating by their political leanings (conservative/liberal). It’s my contention conservatives, typically, are more logic and critical thinking based than liberals and the results may turn out much different. Why were the test participants not grouped by age? Surely older, mature individuals would see things different that young undergrads.
As has been pointed out recently on this very site, our belief systems (BS) are carefully crafted by each of us so as to ensure our happiness and our survival. Each of us must construct our own BS. The only tools we have to construct our BS are our own experience and the things that others teach us. Yes, there are immutable facts like fire burns and water is wet, but after those fairly simplistic and obvious fact based foundations for our BS, we very quickly move from facts that we can experience into teachings that we can not actually experience. The older we get, the more removed the layers of our BS become from experienced facts.
This is further exasperated by others who have a vested interest in deceiving us through false teachings based on false facts.
I don’t know how many of you are engineers, but I am an engineer. The nice thing about engineering is that you can put each theory to the test. I can put each theory to the test. The theory either passes or it fails. If it passes then others can use it without doing the test, confident that others whom are trusted have verified the results. This applies equally to all of the hard sciences – my experience is in engineering.
But…once you wander just a few steps off the path of hard science, you enter into the realm of mists. Economics, psychology, politics, religion. There is no path to proof in these soft sciences. There is no way to know if the conclusions presented in this article are valid. There is no way to define a cause and effect. In these fields one draws conclusions without firm evidence and then presents findings for review by others who can no more validate the findings than the original researcher. This is why the social sciences find almost no citations to their published works. No one reads the published works. No one attempts to duplicate the research described. Did these folks described in the New Yorker article do these studies? Most likely. Did they interpret the results correctly? Probably not. Is the effect that they describe real? Most likely yes, it is real. How can I say this? There are none to say no with authority. There is only the reported finding and the conclusion. That does not mean that it is wrong to leap to the conclusion that they did, it just means that the certainty that a beam will hold a load is much more likely to be true than the conclusions presented in the work described in the article about the work that HSF has provided for our entertainment and edification.
These are soft science. The soft sciences study how the human mind works. How the human mind works is probably the most important thing to study in all of the sciences, but it is also the most difficult. One can not know if Freud was correct. Many have concluded that he was indeed correct and have applied his methods for many years in an attempt to help lots of unhappy people. Were they helped? Who can say. But one thing you can say is that the conclusions that Bernays drew from his uncles work has indeed been impressively successful in creating an industry of deception. Once you see that there is an industry of deception, how can you trust anything that you can not verify as fact? You know, water wet kinda stuff. You can never be sure if the conclusions drawn from the studies done are valid. You can only accept or reject the information based on the BS that you yourself have constructed. Perhaps it is true. The smarter you are, the more facts you have access to, the more nuanced your BS is, the better able you are to discern the veracity of that which is presented to you. Perhaps it is true that people who are dumb enough to do wrong things are too dumb to understand that those things are wrong. I sure hope not.
So all of this might be true, or not. It certainly is not simple. But if you had difficulty following this article then you really should add a layer to your BS. It just wasn’t that complicated. I am amazed to see people read this article, and then use bible quotes. I understand that you see the author as slyly slipping her camel nose of communism under your tent flap of capitalism, but how can you not see that religion is just as soft a science as is economics or poly sci. But no. Religion is a deep foundational layer in most BS. No matter the conflicts in verifiable truths. No matter the horrors and death over the millennia. None of that can as much as scratch the shiny surface of the BS layer that is religion. And it does not matter which religion. It can be muslims killing muslims, christians killing christians, or muslims killing jews. They are all comfortable with the flood of blood because they are confident in their BS.
Maybe this is hardwired into the human mind. Maybe it is a direct extrapolation of a human characteristic that can not be changed but can be easily manipulated. Maybe it is the very thing that led some humans to manipulate other humans. Maybe this is the foundational concept that has led the human race to religion in the first place. This could all be true, but that does not mean that these studies inevitably lead to these conclusions. This is the problem with the soft sciences. One can never verify the results of the experiments.
Spoken like a true engineer. For some reason a lot of my friends are either engineers or some other form of hard science types, this helps explain it. We have a similar vocabulary for how we perceive the world- works/does not work.
“This is the problem with the soft sciences. One can never verify the results of the experiments.”
Which points out the reality that they are not really a science. In order to qualify we must be able to perform an experiment to test our thesis and it must be something that can be reproduced with similar outcomes. Anything else is either faith based perception, or part of the scientific world that hasn’t been noted or properly applied.
Belief systems in the current era are not that different from any other time; faith based or empirical. If I accept something as part of my belief system without verifying it’s authenticity independently, then I am a a faith based believer. If however I check the assertions against a rigid methodology that tests the premise and discover it is provable and repeatable, then I am a rational believer. To be completely open is to be willing to accept any new data that may alter your understanding and be willing to test your held BS against whatever is presented that may challenge that belief.
I’m not interested in being right, I want to understand what is true.
I would call that “pragmatic thinking” or “pragmatism”.
Math
When it comes to engineering how do birds and squirrels know how to construct nests? How do beavers build dams and geese fly in formation? How did these patterns first emerge in an entropic cosmos? What do we believe? Why?
Jeebuz Seeker. I think that TBP is going to be good for you. You seem to be stumbling over questions that you have access to the answers for. Start down the road of study keeping in mind the guidance of HSF and some of the comments made in response to the article that he threw up.
I won’t deal with birds or squirrels just now. Let me focus rather on the entropic cosmos that you have now mentioned twice. While I am not sure that entropic is actually the word, let’s see what the dictionary has to say about entropy.
I suspect that you are referring to the definition in 1 a. Your inference being that if indeed a closed system evolves towards a state of maximum entropy, or maximum randomness, or the lowest energy state possible. In other words, if the universe is a closed system, and that may not be true, how is it that it won’t simply devolve into a vast emptiness of low energy states. The answer my dear seeker is that there is a force in the universe which acts in opposition to entropy and that is the force of gravity. You are standing on a rock, floating in space around a sun which provides all of the energy that you need to live. Both the rock and the sun are shining examples of decreasing entropy in a closed system.
So you see, maybe the second law of thermodynamics is more of a guideline and less of a law although it is still useful in our day to day engineering calculations. It clearly does not apply to your cosmos.
Actually definition 4 a.. Everything dies. How does is the engineering or patterns sustained within the animal kingdom?
Well those things are actually not related but here goes. Yes, everything dies but that is not entropy. And given that everything dies, how does a bird or a squirrel know to build a nest in a tree? How does a beaver know how to build a dam? How do birds know how to fly south? How do dogs know to squat facing north? Let’s start with the nest thing keeping in mind that I have no idea what I am talking about and that the point of the post by HSF was actually that people find it hard to give up on their BS.
This is most likely a combination of experience…I grew up in a nest so I guess I will make a nest for my kids, and teaching. Look, the other birds/squirrels are building their nests that way and I need to build one too so I guess I will build it that way. In all likelihood, there is no gene for nest building just as there would be no gene for cave dwelling. It falls under the category of “I have a problem. How are others solving that problem?” There is no engineering in that sense. There is only copying. You might want to consider why a hummingbird builds his nest out of feathers and spiderwebs while a robin uses twigs and an eagle uses branches. They all have to solve their own problem and they all see others solving the same problem but each is restricted in what it can physically carry.
The same likely applies to the beaver dam.
You may not believe that animals could muster that much intuition, but the evidence proves to the contrary. They are heavily incentivized to solve these problems and it is very clear that they remember the solutions to problems that they have solved in the past. Every bird knows that if he builds a crappy nest, the females are all gonna think that he sucks.
The flying or walking south thing is a bit different. It is driven by the need to stay in the temperature zone where food is available. There is some flexibility in some birds and animals but many are tied to a food source. They have to move as the seasons change to ensure that they can eat. It turns out that many animals and birds, and for that matter you as well, have magnetic particles in their retina that produce information for them as to what is north and what is south. Here is what it looks like to them.
If it is getting cold, they know enough to fly in a southerly direction and they can see what that is. So can caribou, and apparently dogs and even humans although there is no proof that anybody can see what the migratory animals see.
So that is all down to “it is cold and the food is gone, what direction do I go in?” Here again, each individual has a problem. I am cold and I can’t find any food. They see others like themselves solving that problem by flying away so they join in. All in the flock know that they are hungry and cold and the new ones learn what the old ones know. Fly south to the food and the warmth.
Does that help?
Pretty cool, HR. This time of year it’s pretty easy to have questions like Seeker’s. I left my garage open long enough on Sunday for a little birdie to start a nest on top of the door’s motor assembly. I didn’t notice it flying in and out until working out there yesterday. Now it waits outside for me to open the door. How does it remember it’s in there once I seal the garage shut?
The common robin spins in a circular fashion until it forms a basket of sorts.
But the masked weaver bird threads grasses together and stretches them with its feet. Then, if the female isn’t happy, the nest is shit-canned and papa bird starts over.
What kind of genetic patterning determines what type of bird builds what type of nest. Or did all of that come about via environmental impressions over the eons in a random universe?
Not to get all evolutionary or theological or anything like that, but what were the odds, I wonder?
Beavers too! Their teeth are orange because their teeth are strengthed with iron. Their teeth are self-sharpening too and they weigh down the base of their dams with rocks and interlock the timber using river bottom sediment to seal it. The beavers teach their young how to build the dams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJjaQExOPPY
How about oscillations occurring in the brain? My interest in oscillations is from the book Rhythms of The Brain by Gyorgy Buzsaki.
Realize that you have to properly define both the system and the surroundings. In a laboratory, you can cap a beaker of nitrogen and for all extents and purposes, create a closed system at room temperature and pressure. Nothing important will happen – the nitrogen will sit there, the gauge reading whatever temperature and whatever pressure, as long as the room HVAC holds the thermostat setpoint.
BUT – put a lit Bunsen burner under that same sealed beaker, and changes take off. The temperature rises, the pressure builds. Given enough heat the beaker or the cap will rupture, releasing the nitrogen into the room. (Hope the room is big enough / you are far enough away / fast enough on your feet not to suffocate!)
If you think of the earth as a CLOSED system you are wrong – sunlight, meteors and atmospheric escape refute the idea. Neither is gravity opposed to entropy – or there would be no asteroid belts. Gravity does tend to agglomerate masses – but it does not reduce disorder in any significant way, as pieces may bounce off, refuse to coagulate or vaporize off some from the collision. Nor does any internal disorder reduce, unless the melted mass re-coagulates as a crystal instead of an aggregate. Gravity changes configurations of masses, but order is a subtle concept – unless you watch crystallization from the melt. Then you can SEE order created – but the effort to create the cold sink usually requires more energy than you recover from the crystallization, so entropy still wins.
Also, it is not unknown that tidal forces induced in matter can pull stellar objects to pieces.
Considering the sun and earth as a closed system doesn’t work either – the Pioneer spacecraft recently passed the heliopause, the farthest distance the solar wind reaches and outer space begins. The change was noticeable – and showed that the solar space-time disruption has its boundary. But what, then, of the occasional interstellar wandering planet wandering near / into a new system? Perhaps ONLY the universe can be considered a closed system (but – black holes?)
Time for bed, I’m tired!
Hollywood-
I posted this quite a while back, but neglected to see your response to it. This is just a short clip of a 2 hr. 20 min. debate between a Creationist (high school science teacher) and three other scientists:
This link is the entire debate:
About an hour and thirty min. in, there is an exchange about the laws of thermodynamics that you referred to in this thread.
I have a nephew-my father’s only blood descendent- who is in his third yr. of college to become an engineer. He has a fundamental belief of Christianity. He will be doing an internship this summer at a massive energy company’s facility in Tx. He’s quite excited about it, as I am for him.
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum- I guess the fact remains, that nothing will change by BS. Some walk by sight, and others, such as myself, walk by faith. And as it has been defined for me, ‘faith’ is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Respect to you.
I can see that the Frankfurt School of subversion of the European people and the Civilization and nations they have built is alive and well. This article is a blatant attack on truth, rational thinking and the knowledge and wisdom embedded in our genes gathered over generations. The promotion of vaccines and the attack on children is very revealing…although vaccines are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to physically and mentally poisoning and destroying the European people. Substitute “the US” for “Russia” and “Neoconservatism” for “Bolshevism” in Solzhenitsyn’s quote below and you have a pretty accurate picture of the state of affairs in the Western World. The diabolical Neo-Bolsheviks control the west and that includes a deceitful and lying Trump.
“You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
wow
” like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved.”
Confirmation bias indeed!
This article reminded me why I enjoy watching Louder with Crowder Change my Mind episodes.
“Over the last 50 years there has been a big increase in the number of vaccines given to children. If all these vaccines were given separately, each child would have to receive a large number of injections. Combination vaccines such as the 6-in-1 and the MMR have been developed to help reduce the number of injections needed.”
From 1:5,000 to 1:110 in the same time frame we switched over to MMR vaccines. To deliberately flood an infant’s autoimmune system with multiple viruses to affect their health and then blithely ignoring a statistical firestorm that coincides with this program tells you everything you need to know about the policy’s proponents.
VAXXED: Silent Epidemic – The Untold Story of Vaccines [Movie]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTjvX6s2Jvk&list=PLFoOXj1_P4xghxnpY3Hs8tAk_4CY_1hMb
Everything You Need To Know About vaccines | The Collective Evolution Show | Ep 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PjRWR_Wo30
Vaccines Caused My Son’s Autism
https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/vaccines-caused-sons-autism/
Details here:
“It’s all there–this is the lowest point in my career, that I went along with that paper. I have great shame now when I meet families of kids with autism, because I have been part of the problem.”
– William Thompson, CDC Whistleblower.
In 2011, a Danish psychiatrist embezzled over $2 million in phony grants he wrote to himself while completing a fraudulent study that attempted to erase the vaccine/autism connection once and for all for Big Pharma. Paul Thorsen, who is NOT a doctor and NOT a scientist, figured out a trick where he (opportunistically) mixed statistics from two separate, unrelated charts and made it look like mercury in vaccines had nothing to do with the sharp rise in autism rates (which came from a NEW national registry requiring all autism victims to be registered). The CDC catapulted Thorsen as a genius who discovered something monumental. Thorsen was indicted by a federal grand jury in Atlanta on charges of wire fraud, money laundering and defrauding research institutions of grant money.
The CDC should be indicted for massive fraud and corruption (not to mention murder) along with Big Pharma.
Don’t forget the water purified and stored in plastic bottles, shipped cross country and promoted as healthy for lifestyles.
If you’ve not seen this guy discuss the impact of the toxic foods on the mind AND the gut.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1IE1yuhkZ4?start=62&w=560&h=315%5D
Also, the next boxes will contain some items for the Stuck. Hopefully, they will be kindly reviewed and either sent on or respectfully set aside. There’s a rock in there that visited my Granny Fannie’s grave. Holy ground indeed.
Not a pro-vaxxer here, but this exponential curve could map to a number of other things: glyphosate use, atmospheric pollution, HFCS consumption… etc., etc.
http://www.autismsupportnetwork.com/news/mit-doctor-claims-autism-afflict-50-american-children-2025-glyphosate-blame-2523533
I’d agree except for the fact that adults don’t develop the disorder, children do and adults are exposed to all of the things you listed above, often in far greater amounts and concentrations.
The key is to narrow it down to what has this effect on the young in their environment or exposures. The vaccines seems strongly linked. Add to that the fact that the drug companies have been caught multiple times trying to either hide or distort the data that demonstrates those connections. That’s not a good sign.
Not saying you are wrong, but exposure to certain substances in utero is different from adult exposure (think of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome). It all certainly bears further investigation and healthy skepticism of what we are being sold.
There is also a diagnosis factor to be considered. Things that would have made one “eccentric” or “quiet” a generation ago are no considered to be “on the spectrum.” The diagnosis of autism is also a soft science and is definitely used to squeeze money out of fearful parents.
HSF says ” If someone’s mind hasn’t been changed from the proper application of facts, by all means, dial 911, they are either dead or at risk.”
How about “As Bolshevik’s, If someone’s mind hasn’t been changed from the proper application of our facts, by all means they should be put to death.”
Don’t believe in man-made climate change – death
Don’t believe in the safety of vaccines – death
Don’t believe in banning guns – death
Don’t believe in endless wars – death
and on and on and on
Don’t believe in God — death.
I see the type of emotional “thinking” done all the time, everywhere. On this thread, for sure, in the self-same article decrying it, relentlessly…
…and in my own thinking, abso-fucking-lutley.
I can affect only one of these…any guesses?
This should have been the point of the article.
The only path forward is to examine the endless labyrinth our “self” with the utmost possible scrutiny and continually do the difficult, grimy, endless work of cleansing the relentless muck that exist in every nook and cranny and replacing it with something only the tiniest bit better.
But, by God, it is so much easier to simply point out why everyone else is wrong.
I think you are confusing the issue with facts.
Never expect a socialist/libtard/neocon/cuckservative to be swayed by the truth.
Remember, it is all on the level.
The NYer article is kinda crappy, but here’s something along similar lines that HSF, Hollywood Rob, and perhaps others may appreciate:
http://cmm.ucsd.edu/varki/denial/home.html
I just picked this book up recently and am about a quarter of the way in..
My spin: we evolved superior intelligence [in order to faster and more effectively break down energy gradients, imo] but to the extent that intelligence came with suggestions of what NOT to do, those suggestions needed to be suppressed in order to “progress”.
I think it would be a bit more accurate to say it isn’t our ability to deny reality, but rather to create a believable non-reality. If there is a present truth that causes anxiety, denial doesn’t obviate it, but an alternative that is brighter or more acceptable will.
I think the premise is basically a good one, it just focuses on the much rarer denial while ignoring the far more prevalent invented reality.
I disagree that denial is in any way rare. There may be “carrot” aspects to creating pleasant unrealities, but the driving force is the unpleasant “stick” of reality, imo. Look at the crazy gymnastics employed to explain black dysfunction when IQ data (and empiric results in places like Liberia, Zimbabwe, etc.) is staring everyone in the face. It’s not because people want to pay teachers more or change testing standards or take whatever supposedly-constructive steps because those seems like pleasant ideas… it’s because the reality is too painful, given that it diverges from what is socially acceptable to consider.
In the religious realm (and also in the techno-utopian realm), an abiding belief is (to borrow a phrase from Star Trek) “the man must continue”. Why? Why must the man continue? The alternative is unpleasant to consider.
I didn’t mean that denial was rare, but rather that it was rarely successful as a strategy. Denial always manifests in other self-destructive behaviors in order to be efficacious.
Well, the self-destructive behaviors only have to be not-self-destructive-enough to allow for near-term reproductive success. Until now, humans have succeeded to the extent of co-opting and exhausting or polluting most of the biosphere.
When you talk about “strategy”, you have to consider that that is something which an individual can initiate towards an end, when the world doesn’t work that way.. there is no plan… only what happens. Fukushima was designed by some very smart people, but their “strategy” wasn’t to poison the Pacific ocean.. it just “happened”.
It is a very interesting idea and there is definitely a psychological component to evolution, but it still leaves that huge hole right through the center of things: in order to fear death, one must first discover the FUTURE. I think it is this notion, rather than becoming aware of the self, that is at the very heart of sentience.
At some point somewhere, there was a human-like creature that had no notion of anything beyond the present and then it did. It is an absolutely staggering idea, that definitely happened and is taken for granted by virtually every sentient being that came after.
And still there was a vast amount of time before it and there are unknown myriad levels of analysis beneath it. I say it again, our ignorance is literally infinite.
“…in order to fear death, one must first discover the FUTURE.”
Or witness it over and over during the course of your life and be able to make the logical conclusion regarding oneself. Once we developed memory that went beyond a few days and the ability to communicate, shared knowledge gave us informed understanding of the concept of the future. But I think we understood the inevitability of our own fate well before that happened.
“Or witness it over and over during the course of your life and be able to make the logical conclusion regarding oneself.”
No.
My assertion is that discovery of the future comes before the discovery of “oneself” and way way before “logic.”
I do agree that was the process. But all the species of the world have witnessed the deaths of others like them, yet none have discovered the future. None have made even the tiniest step toward sentience, at least as far as I know.
That’s not entirely true, and the book, Denial, does try to pin down when that degree of self-awareness arose. A number of non-human animals do display some elements of a “Theory of Mind”, as it is called, but not to the extent seen in humans.
That’s why I threw in the “At least as far as I know.” Not my area of expertise at all, and is a move from logical framework to scientific investigation. I can easily see that it would be a process and a long one, but still at the end of that process there would be a transition point, from not being aware of death to being aware. Again, staggering.
For the most part I have stayed out of your discussion on this point. It is interesting, but I didn’t feel I had anything to add. But you have now moved into a different place and I would like to add one thing that is very fresh in my mind. It revolves around animals and their perception of death. Drud, I think that you are wrong on that. Animals of all types understand very well that they can be dead, and that they don’t want to be dead. Some fight against ridiculous odds. Some run from their fate. But they all want to go on living. What is more, they have a very acute perception of when something is wrong with their human flock mates.
We have a parrot. He is over 40 years old and has lived with us his entire life. When he was young he liked me. He flew to me and sat on my shoulder. Then he matured and decided that he liked my wife and saw me apparently as an opponent for her affection. So now, he tries to bite me and he will let her run her hands all over him. This winter we both got pretty sick. When she was sick we couldn’t keep the bird on his cage. He kept climbing down and walking across the floor to be closer to her. Finally she gave up and put him up on her where he was happy. When I was sick he couldn’t have cared less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby
You are arguing that animals lack an awareness of death and I think that there is ample proof that they are very aware of death and the meaning of death. This is just one of an unending number of examples of animals mourning the loss of their companions. Elephants even fondle the bones of the long dead sisters.
I suggest that this means that they really do understand death so I suspect that you should not pin your hopes on self awareness on that particular point.
Indeed, Rob. There’s an unfortunately long history of people wanting to remove themselves from associations with animals, and from association with nature, the workings and behaviors of which were seen to be somehow “base” and beneath us.
Yet my old dog was far more “moral” than my Rapture-Ready™® sister, just as a function of biology and knowing what side his bread was buttered on. My sister stares at FB all day trying to come to terms with why her creepy pastor-employer fired her ass 5 years ago.
Non-human animals are refreshing because they don’t have the BS Belief Systems to make them do nutty things. But doing Nutty Things breaks down the energy gradients faster and better, ergo….
I will be surprised if no one else posts the viddy at the end my spiel.
The history of health is littered with dead ideas. Old practices die hard. Leeches, garlic in your arm pits, blood letting, the list is as long as history. When I was 7 or 8 they gave me massive injections of iron to bring up my red blood count, a no longer accepted treatment for the condition I had. It was considered proper to give a little kid an enema to change his behaviors. (Yes it happened to me and I researched it when in grad school. It was in the books.)
While attending Emory I dated and loved the daughter of the journalist who was in charge for press released from the CDC. He was stricken with a massive heart attack while I was there. Emory was next door neighbors almost, to CDC (and Yerkes Primate Center).
It saddens me to hear of tainted research from there. And am not surprised by big Pharma’s influence. Big oil and big pharma run the world.
The first linked viddy has been taken down by YT. The second managed to hold my interest despite my cognitive biases. I recall a YT poll asking if I supported mandatory vaccinations. I answered yes. After watching the viddy I would qualify that to say I support vaccinations via SAFE procedures.
With any medical procedure there will always be outlying results. People die all the time from simple medications, anaphylactic shock and all. Peanuts, latex, cat dander… The question posed in ethics class given to medical and dental students was when do you decide, and who decides what is safe or not.
The viddy speaks of 10-15% of folks may be harmed by vaccines, epigenetic influences and such. Sounds possible to me. They say 10% of folks are addiction prone, drug addict, alcoholic bad enough to require intervention.
Or one in ten will have homosexual orientation, even with severe cultural penalties. More if it is encouraged. And yet many are adamant in proscribing sanctions and judgement against the outliers. The force on this is strong among the choir here.
My prejudice may be showing but both of the men exposing the deception depicted in the video wear female type jewelry. Perhaps signaling? It matters not to me, the apparent truths and exposure of wrong doing remains clear to me.
I try to make a comparison of, if you are straight hetero and moralistically fundamentalist, you may not care so much about the health effects among queer folk and sodomites.
If you believe you will not be harmed by bad medicine labeled good by science, you will care less about those who may have susceptibility to deleterious effects and lead you to be suspicious of any who question the dogma. I try restate what the viddy authors say and what HF leads us to question.
And I wish for exposure and dialogue about vaccinations. Baby and bathwater.
Thanks HF for your efforts in bringing this to the table.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FIMvSp01C8
Humans are born socialists. They like to claim the ideas of others as their own, I call it the ‘you didn’t build it, I did’ mentality.
You can count on your left hand, the really important inventors. Their ideas have been appropriated by the Alt Right as their own.
Young punk bastards should stop protesting and start inventing shit. Boomers created the modern world, you owe us, bitches.
Geez, it started off OK, but then when applied all I could see was the speck in the author’s eye. They are so sure of their conclusions, when in fact they are subject to the same weaknesses we all have.
Instead of understanding their biases, and being humble, they only see other’s biases, because of course they have the “experts” on their side.
I also thought it interesting how these two spinners pointed their digital fingers at alt-right male chauvinists for trolling without actually referring to the substance behind what was allegedly trolled:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/13/18308652/katie-bouman-black-hole-science-internet
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/4/16/18311194/black-hole-katie-bouman-trolls
Facts cannot change minds. Only values can change minds. That is why our current administrative law system is not working. The foundation of our administrative law system is based on facts… facts that contain no values.
Western civilization foundation is based in Christianity. And what is the foundation of Christianity…The Golden Rule: Treat others as you would expect them to treat you. The supreme value of Christianity.
Administrative Law is not Christian because it does not have values in it like Christianity.
The Law of Nature is Survival of the Fittest. In certain contexts, Christian outreach, tolerance, self-sacrifice, and conviviality can confer a survival advantage; in other contexts, they do not.
“Values” do not change minds.
Bread on the table changes minds.
“What have you done for me lately?”
I have feelings of nostalgia for a church that was incidentally mine, by birth and by marriage, but if that church can no longer fulfill its role in social cohesion for whatever reason, it will be cast aside.
News Flash: most beings do not operate on that level. An increasing number of humans consider christians to be idiots/ prey/weak, and are currently making headway against christian culture based on those largely-correct assumptions.
Remember, it’s all about what works and what doesn’t work.
Any living being can expect to be attacked and/or eaten by any creature it encounters, from the macro- to the micro-scopic. There are billions of organisms metaphorically salivating, waiting to break down the energy gradient your body represents. It’s a war of all-against-all, and if you don’t perceive that, I think you will be at a disadvantage. It’s like entering a street fight in Cairo insisting upon the Queensberry rules. Good luck with that.
—
The Christian Era was coincident with an expansionist Age of general conquest and increasing surplus. Like with Capitalism, it remains to be seen how it might persist in the coming age of scarcity, contraction, and de-growth.
The Kingdom of Heaven is a state of mind; not a place. It is true that we live in a world of organisms all eating each other for survival. That is what life here on earth is all about.
But in places where the golden rule abides and facts coexist with values harmony exists in the minds of people.
There are very few true Christians walking around.
Scarcity, contraction, and de-growth are also a state of mind just like prosperity is a state of mind. Belief in the ideas these words express brings about the condition. That is why the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.
Hoo boy.. you been reading The Secret?
Toilets and zippers are not fucking complicated. lol. The only thing complicated about inventions like these is that they are like 90% invented by whites, who are under a program of passive genocide. Who the hell is going to invent the next zipper when whites are wiped out? Do they care? Hell no, they don’t want us inventing any more zippers. Put plainly, they want massive numbers of humans to die. And it’s those goddam whites and their propensity to innovate humanity out of the huge sustainability hole we keep digging ourselves further into each year.