Monthly Archives: February 2016

The meowing tree

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I am now going to explain the line of reasoning due to which I believe that the near-death experiences should be explained by the most straightforward narrative, which says that those people indeed died and experienced the afterlife. The same reasoning applies for the spiritual experiences of the saints.

Years ago my wife and I were walking along a path and as we passed by a tree, it meowed at us. It was dark and we couldn’t see the cat on the tree, but although we couldn’t see it, it sounded like a young cat, and it wasn’t happy. Since it was too dark to do anything constructive about it, we went our way.

Now, if we didn’t believe in the existence of cats, or if we didn’t believe that cats can climb trees yet forget how to get down, we might have looked for another explanation; maybe someone placed an electronic device for reproducing sound on the tree. Maybe a man was on the tree, imitating a cat in order to fuck with us. Maybe it were little green men in flying saucers. Maybe.

We didn’t see direct evidence of cat on that tree, but we accepted the obvious explanation of the meowing tree, because we are informed and reasonable.

However, in the case of NDE experiences, some people would rather believe in the most idiotic, improbable and flawed explanations, just to avoid the obvious conclusion that if something meows at you from a tree in the dark, it must be a cat.

Why generalizations are good

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Yes, I generalize. Yes, I overwhelmingly rely on statistics instead of individual accounts. And now I’m going to explain why you should, too.

I am extremely sensitive to sample bias, because I tend to surround myself with extremely atypical individuals. This is not uncommon; if you study physics, all your friends can probably do calculus in their heads, and very soon you start believing that it’s something everybody can do, or that it is much more common than it actually is. The problem is magnified by the echo-chambers of the Internet, because similar people tend to form interest groups that exclude the outside world and are in fact rather hostile to opinions that are uncommon in their group. After a while, their perception of reality is so severely skewed by their personal sample bias, that what they think is going on in the world has very little in common with the actual world.

You can call it the Marie Antoinette syndrome, if you like; I’m referring to the anecdote where she was told about the riots on the streets and she asked about the cause, and when she was told that the people have no bread, she allegedly responded along the lines of “Stupid mob, they should eat cake instead”. That’s what I’m talking about when I refer to sample bias. When you’re surrounded only by rich people you can’t really understand that the poor people don’t have the option to choose between this or that food, because they can afford only the cheapest kind, and if it isn’t available, they will starve. You have only what one would call the first world problems (“the line at Starbucks was too long so I didn’t have coffee this morning”).

I’m not saying that applying personal preference to our personal choice of company is a bad thing. The whole point is to find people who are more like us, so that we can function at our peak potential, which would be impossible if we were surrounded by people who have interests and abilities so different from our own that there’s no significant intersection. It’s a good thing. What I’m saying is, it isn’t healthy to use our personal experience, formed by an extremely skewed sample of the general population, in order to form opinions about the state of society in general.

This is why I rely on statistics. If someone did a meticulous scientific analysis of some social group, using large unbiased samples, I am going to rely on his findings much more than I’m going to rely on my limited experience with members of that group, because if you’re in heaven, you will tend to think that everybody is a saint, and if you’re in hell, you’ll tend to think that everybody is a demon. What you need is a wider picture, which tells you how many people in total there are, of which how many are in hell and how many are in heaven, and of those in each group, you will want a breakdown by certain characteristics in order to see a pattern. Essentially, what you need to do is remove yourself from the picture and acquire sufficient distance, in order to gain perspective.

But this wider perspective doesn’t influence the way I treat individual people. I can have generalized opinions about a certain group of people based on statistics, but that individual you are dealing with can be normal for that group, or extremely atypical. It’s like trying to form opinions about me based on general statistical facts about Croats. Not the best idea. On an individual level, you need to treat people like individuals, and do your best to perceive the actual person you’re dealing with. However, this individual approach is actually dangerous when you’re dealing with large populations, and if you don’t resort to statistics you will be unable to form useful opinions. What you need are generalizations – you need to know what an expected median sample of a population is, and for an individual, you need to know where he is placed on the histogram of his population group. If you’re talking to a +3 sigma individual, you know how many of those you can realistically expect to find where he came from. If you’re in Jet Propulsion Laboratory you need to be aware that each individual there is probably extremely atypical for any population, to the point where he’s more alien than human; the average person there has a PhD and Mensa level IQ. If you’re in the army, everyone you encounter is most likely representative of the general population and it would be unlikely for you to encounter an atypical individual.

If you’re an atypical individual, it is exceedingly difficult for you to find others like you in a general population, and the best thing about the Internet is that it enables you to find others like you much more easily, allowing you to skip the arduous task of checking out uninteresting individuals with very low odds of finding what you’re looking for. However, this opens you to extreme sample bias, because the ease with which you can meet other atypical individuals can blind you to the placement of your interest group on the population histogram. Essentially, you tend to think that everybody is like you and that your group represents what people normally are, and that actually has an unknown probability of being true.

Skepticism as the ultimate douchebaggery

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The role and character of skepticism are incredibly misunderstood.

Every now and then I hear how skepticism is essential to science, that it is in fact the cornerstone of scientific thought. Then, on the other hand, I hear how I should be skeptical of things I hear and believe only in what I personally can attest to with my senses – from people who try to convince me that Earth is flat, and everyone who thinks otherwise is either stupid, crazy or criminal, because that’s what our senses tell us, that Earth is flat, that Sun and the stars are moving, and since we need to be skeptical of everything we can’t personally witness, what is one to do?

I encountered this uncritical praise of skepticism decades ago and my initial response was so unexpected and radical, that it probably didn’t make sense to most people then, because in the 90s the Moon landing skeptics and flat-earthers were almost nowhere to be found, and it seemed implausible that anyone in his right mind could espouse such ideas, but that exactly was my point, that skepticism isn’t about the right mind. Skepticism is a mental disease.

Skepticism is, essentially, the ability to question or dismiss something you don’t emotionally like. You don’t like heliocentrism so you are skeptical of it and you dismiss it. You don’t like the theory of evolution so you are skeptical of it and you dismiss it. It has nothing to do with science, because although it’s true that scientists can be skeptical of something and dismiss it, this is not an inherent part of scientific method. Scientific method is to test theories by experiment and change them if evidence doesn’t support them. This is not skepticism, it’s a feedback loop between theory and observation. It’s evidence-based rational thinking. Skepticism is an emotional response which takes place when your worldview is shaken and your favorite ideas are threatened. You are then defensive of your favorite ideas and skeptical of that which contradicts them. There is absolutely nothing even remotely scientific about it, because I can quote the trial of Galileo, which went something like this:

Inquisition: Sir, it came to our attention that you have been publicizing cosmological theories that contradict the holy scripture. Since you are a very famous scientist, we will now hear your explanation and, if we find it convincing, we are ready to offer a different interpretation of the parts of scripture that contradict your interpretation of the Universe.

Galileo: Thank you. Using magnifying glasses I made a telescope, which made it possible for me to observe otherwise invisible celestial bodies. This way I discovered that Jupiter has four satellites that revolve around it, which makes the geocentric theory, which states that all celestial bodies revolve around the Earth, implausible. From this I infer that the theory of Copernicus, which states that the planets actually revolve around the Sun and not the Earth, is true.

Inquisition: Your observation is very interesting, but does it really prove what you infer from it? Wouldn’t it be a more parsimonic conclusion if we said that both Jupiter and its satellites revolve around the same thing we previously assumed Jupiter to revolve around?

Galileo: You are all stupid unenlightened buffoons! (fuming)

Inquisition: Be it as it may, what we need to do is decide which theory is more consistent with available evidence. Our current Ptolemaic system is able to predict eclipses of celestial bodies with a certain degree of accuracy. Compared to that, what is the degree of accuracy of predictions made by your alternative heliocentric model?

Galileo: It is worse.

Inquisition: So what you are saying is that the system you are proposing we adopt as better has worse accuracy in predicting celestial events than the system we are currently using?

Galileo: Yes. However, the Ptolemaic system has been refined and improved for centuries, and mine is brand new, and needs much work in order to show its full potential.

Inquisition: But isn’t a better model supposed to immediately show its superiority by offering better predictions?

Galileo: Not necessarily, because we need to have faith that mathematics will be improved in the future, allowing us to refine the model and make sense of things in ways that are currently not possible.

Inquisition: So essentially you are asking that we have faith in your model, because at the moment evidence and reason argue against it?

Galileo: You are all stupid and don’t understand science! (stomps his foot helplessly)

Inquisition: We heard enough. We are going to stick with our “inferior” model which at the moment offers better accuracy in its predictions, thank you very much, and you sir are going to stop publicizing unproven theories as of now, and this is our official verdict.

I’m slightly embellishing the narrative for dramatic purposes but you get the picture. The Church actually approached the issue from the position of scientific skepticism, and Galileo needed to resort to faith. The trick is, they were both right and wrong. The Church was right not to embrace a model which was based more on sacred geometry than on mathematics and physics, and Galileo was wrong to recommend official adoption of a model that obviously wasn’t ready. The right thing to do would be to concede that Galileo’s model is a contemporary equivalent to the superstring theory: it looks like a promising direction in which to look for potential solutions, but the mathematics doesn’t yet work, the theory doesn’t predict anything well and it simply isn’t ready for mainstream. However, the main stream theory is ugly enough and bad enough for one to rightly conclude that it can’t be really true, because something as inelegant can’t be the right answer, so it’s warranted to look into alternative directions, based merely on faith and aesthetics.

Where I agree with Inquisition is that Galileo needed to be told to shut the fuck up until his theory is ready for peer review. However, they were wrong to put their confidence in the Ptolemaic system just because it worked better and agreed with their scripture. They knew something was wrong with it but they chose the easy way, and that’s the main reason behind their skepticism – not some great love for the truth, but inertia and spiritual laziness.

Galileo, however, was an arrogant, pompous fool and was more wrong than right about anything. He was actually on the bad side of science regarding the tides and the comets, for instance, and gets so much undeserved credit in the history of science only because it serves a popular myth of science vs. Church, which was hugely popularized with the invention of the printing press. He happened to be right regarding the structure of the Solar system, but only based on aesthetics and faith. He didn’t have any actual science to back it up. Why did he assume that the celestial bodies move in circles? Based on sacred geometry, because the Greeks thought that circles were the perfect shape and what else would a perfect God put in heavens? There was no theory of why the planets move at all, no theory of gravity, no theory of inertia. All they had was aesthetics and gut feelings.

But guess what? When science is actually the weakest tool that you have at your disposal and doesn’t really tell you anything, you need to use guesswork and gut feelings and aesthetics and make shit up, throw it at the wall and see what sticks. You need to watch apples fall, and ask why. You need to throw a ball in the air, observe the curve it makes, and make lots of guesswork regarding why it goes up, then slows down, and then accelerates again falling down. Then you need to say “Wow, what if a cannonball does exactly the same thing, only too fast to see? And the faster you launch it, the flatter the curve. What if you launched it fast enough that the the curvature of its descent matched the curvature of the Earth? And what if the Moon does the same thing, falling around the Earth forever, following the curvature of the Earth? And what if all the planets do the same around the Sun?”

What is absolutely guaranteed to lead you nowhere, is skepticism. With skepticism, you will simply reject everything that doesn’t support your preconceived notions and you will remain a happy douchebag, convinced that you are on the right side of science and knowledge. And the worst possible thing you can do is trust yourself and your own observations, and be skeptical of everything else, because you are most likely just not smart enough. The path to not being a stupid fool is not called skepticism, it’s called faith. You need to have faith in order to go to school and learn things. You need to have faith in order to actually bother with science. You need to have faith in order to persevere throughout your difficult times and ignorance and inability to personally test and verify things. But eventually, if you had enough faith and confidence and perseverance, you do get to be smart enough to personally verify and test things. You do get to be smart enough to be able to know, and then you no longer need faith, because now you have knowledge. Just don’t forget that knowledge didn’t get you there. You got there through faith, because you walked the path without seeing the goal, and you put your trust in the words of others and in the sign posts. If you were skeptical, you’d have failed. If you had doubts, they’d have sapped your will to persevere throughout difficulties. If you listened to the voice of reason, it would have told you to quit on the 90% of the way because you invested all that effort and you still can’t see the goal and you still can’t verify that you made the right choice to have faith.

The scientists (as in “adherents of scientism”, not “practitioners of scientific method”) usually divide the world into two parts: science and bullshit. They always did, even at the early times of science, when it didn’t really explain much of the world, and when such sentiment was mere faith. However, I see things differently. I divide the world into the part for which we have reasonably convincing explanations, the part that we know is bullshit and falsehood, and the part of which we are ignorant, of which we have no knowledge or explanations. For instance, up until recently we didn’t have any knowledge of what Pluto’s surface looks like. It was a blurry dot. Now we know it looks like this:

But it looked like this even when we didn’t know it. It looked like this even when we didn’t know Pluto existed. What does Eris look like? What do Haumea and Makemake look like? That’s the part we don’t know, and the good thing is that we know that we don’t know. What is it that we think we know, and we actually don’t? That’s the part where we would normally react with skepticism to defend what we think we know, but we should be highly skeptical of our motivations in doing so, and we should be especially skeptical of our skepticism, because it might well be the result of our ignorance reacting in self-defense.

We might look at the flat-earthers and the Moon landing conspiracy theorists and see them as pathetic figures, but I see them as something more sinister. I see them as victims of that same vile beast of skepticism that threatens to eat us all if we allow it to roam unchained. You see, skepticism is not what made Yuri Gagarin climb into that capsule on top of that rocket. Skepticism would have told him there was no reason to believe he would succeed, and, even more importantly, that he wouldn’t die. Nobody did it before and therefore there was no evidence that it could be done. But he had faith, and he had courage, and he had trust, and he had confidence.

And when I see “skeptics”, atheists, materialists and scientists of all kinds, in their arrogant mockery of faith, I want to stomp their smug faces into the ground, because if it were left to the likes of them, we’d still be living on trees and in caves. The likes of them ridiculed the first ape-man who used fire to roast his meat, they ridiculed the first ape-man who used a fire-hardened spear to hunt, they ridiculed the first woman who planted seeds into the ground to grow more instead of eating them. They are fucking idiots, and if it were left to them, only evil, ignorance and darkness would rule in this world, and all light and beauty would have been extinguished before it had a chance to show its potential.

Why Socrates was an idiot

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Socrates supposedly used a triple-sieve technique to filter out signal from noise in his life. If something was true, good and useful, then it got a pass. If not, he wouldn’t want to hear about it.

Sounds reasonable, right? Let’s see how we would have fared if the most important things in history were subjected to his filter.

Someone breaks off a sharp sliver of rock and figures out you can cut stuff with it. But is it true? I don’t know. It just is. Is it good? I don’t know, it just is, ethical criteria don’t apply. Is it useful? Yes, but it’s also possibly dangerous because you can cut yourself with it or kill people. Fail.

Someone accidentally drills a hole in wood too forcefully and produces a fire. Wow, fire! But is it true? Well, it just is. Is it good? I don’t know, I guess you can either cook a meal with it or burn your house down, so it depends. Is it useful? Yeah, it’s useful. It’s also possibly harmful, so sorry, fail.

Someone invented the wheel and made a cart that can transport goods more efficiently to bigger distances. But is it true? Sort of. Is it good? How can we tell what will come of it eventually? Maybe people will use it to make chariots of war and kill people. Is it useful? Well, we don’t know, we haven’t tried it out yet. Fail.

And that’s why the Greeks poisoned the motherfucker, because if people used his kind of philosophy to decide about things, they’d still be eating bananas on trees. Maybe people then intuitively understood the peril of asking too many questions.

In order to make any kind of progress, you need to work exactly with things that haven’t yet been proven true, good or useful. You must be ready to test ideas that sound crazy, like the one that the Earth isn’t flat and that the Sun doesn’t actually move in the sky from east to west every day, but that the Earth actually revolves around its axis, or that men could possibly fly faster than the birds or dive deeper than the fish. You need to work with things that are morally ambivalent and can be used for both good or ill, because good or ill is not in things but in the mind of the user. You need to be ready to do useless things because you never know what you could stumble into. You might find mold spoiling samples in your Petri dish, you might throw plates around the cafeteria and see how they fall and discover quantum electrodynamics and win Nobel prize. You can’t know what you’ll end up with just based on what it sounds to your pompous quasi-intellectual arrogance.

You need to give things a chance to show themselves, to tell you what they are. You can’t just silence everything based on what you think you know about truth, goodness and usefulness. Socrates was a pompous ass who didn’t even realize how incredibly harmful and wrong his “philosophy” was. If cavemen questioned things the way he deemed appropriate, they would no longer be living in caves, they’d go back to living on trees. Fortunately, they tested things by practical application and experiment and not skepticism, and so here we are.

Why we have a Muslim problem

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Our “multicultural” problem consists of two main elements.

The first element is that people in the West basically started to believe their own bullshit about how all civilizations and cultures are the same and the differences amount to clothing, cuisine, art and customs. For this reason, they think it’s a bad thing to discriminate between cultures and civilizations and this created the biggest part of the problem, where you are unable to do anything about evil because you’re not allowed to even recognize it properly, let alone do something about it.

The second element is that inferior civilizations live in a very dangerous illusion. They believe we are weak.

It’s a rather new development. The Ottoman empire in the Ataturk’s times was the most advanced Islamic state of the time, and it could never believe itself to be the equal of Europe, let alone its superior. All the weapons and technology they had in WW1 were given to them by the Germans. Outdated German shit was ten times better than the best stuff the Turks could do. Ataturk therefore concluded that the only way forward for them was to reject Islam and embrace the tenets of the Western civilization, because that’s the only way. That’s where progress is, where technology is, where reality is. Islam is where outdated useless bullshit is.

But something strange happened in the meantime. Colonialism was abolished and the Islamic tribes were allowed to profit from oil, and they became incredibly rich. Because it became unpopular in the West to simply enslave inferior people and take their resources, we instead traded with them and they got our money and could buy the technological artifacts our modern scientific civilization could produce. Because they became incredibly wealthy from all the money we allowed them to receive in our newly-found post-colonial kindness, they started to think of themselves as better than us, because on average they were wealthier than us. Since they were never forced to compete with us on equal terms, and we simply gave them stuff because they happened to live in places where we found oil, they were able to keep their inferior, idiotic beliefs that nobody in the West could have and be able to contribute something of value in the world of science and technology. Being able to keep their stupid shit, and having too much money for their own good, they started evaluating the world from the perspective of their stupid medieval bullshit. They think we are weak because we give them free money instead of simply enslaving them and taking everything we want (which we could do with trivial ease if we just stopped putting artificial restraints on our own actions). They think we are weak because we Western men treat women as our equals. They think we are weak because they are stupid enough to confuse our choice to be kind with inability to be strong and cruel. Worst of all, they believe in outward manifestations of strength, and they think that lack thereof means weakness.

So let me teach Muslims an important lesson here.

We can kill you all if we choose to. There’s absolutely nothing you could to about it, we are that much stronger. We have so much nuclear weapons, we could turn all places in the world, where Muslims are the majority, into glass parking lots, and simply pick up all the Muslims who live among us, put them in concentration camps and kill them. It would take us less than a year if we actually decided to do it. Don’t ever think we can’t do it, because we in the West invented genocide, we invented wars where tens of millions of people died, we invented chemical weapons, we invented nuclear weapons, and if you all lived on Mars, we could nuke you even there, because we know how to do it and we have the technology to do it. The reason why we are kind and tolerant and polite, and why we allow you pieces of shit to fuck with us, is because we are actually scared of our own power. We are so powerful we could kill every living thing on this planet ten times over, and if we don’t restrain ourselves artificially, there is absolutely nothing else that could restrain us. We are afraid we could do terrible evils if we don’t control ourselves, and so we do, to a fault. We saw the evils of the two world wars in which we used modern technology to kill as many people as we could, and after we nuked two Japanese cities at the end of the last war, we got genuinely scared. We knew it went too far. Hitler used science and technology to commit genocide. Americans used science and technology to evaporate entire cities full of people. We were aghast with horror at our power to do evil unless we restrain ourselves, and so we did. We decided to stop enslaving you and to allow you to have your own states. We decided to allow you to profit from mineral resources found on your lands. Whatever you have, you have because we decided to allow it.

So I would recommend that you stop right here and think carefully about what you are about to do next. To help you think, I will show pictures that you will recognize as our weakness.

In this picture, you can see how we allow women to work in our important factories and wear uniforms like men. Oh, how much weaker must we be than your “mighty” mujahideen? True, if we waged war with swords and arrows, but this is Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This is where we produced fissile materials for Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Let’s see another picture:

See how weak those guys look? None of them carries a gun, or a sword. They look mild and non-aggressive. They’re not warriors, like you are. They just write formulas on paper. About how to split U-235 and kill you all without ever even having to see you.

Take a look at this fellow:

He was a gentle, kind person, not like your Islamic warriors. He made modern agriculture possible by inventing the Haber-Bosch method of producing artificial fertilizers. He also invented the modern chemical weapons that were used in the first world war.

Our scantly dressed girls walking around without having to be afraid of being raped aren’t a sign of our weakness. They are a sign of our strength. The fact that we don’t need to be armed, that we don’t have to accompany our women everywhere for their safety, is a sign of confidence that we can destroy any possible threat with unimaginable ease. You were able to temporarily test our limits simply because it never crossed our minds that anyone would be crazy enough to even try, because we are so incredibly powerful. The problem is, even most of us forgot why we can do what we do and why we are not afraid of anyone, because we protected everyone from our horrible power so long ago, that we stopped even thinking about having it, and being able to use it. Most of us would be horrified at the thought of simply exterminating you like vermin with nuclear weapons, not because our cute little girls dressed in something revealing and very comfortable couldn’t press buttons that would turn all of your “mighty warriors of Islam” into blast-shadows and rotting flesh, but because we think it would be cruel and inhumane. The reason why we hate even thinking about it is the same as the reason why we don’t eat babies. It’s not because we couldn’t, but because we don’t want to be turned into baby-eating monsters. We restrain ourselves in our horrible capacity to wield death, because we don’t want to make those choices and be those persons.

Killing all Muslims would be as easy for us as killing a half-buried helpless woman by throwing stones is for your “mighty” mujahideen. It’s not for the lack of our power that you are allowed to fuck with us. It’s exactly because of our horrible, immense power, that scares us senseless, because we could so easily become the worst imaginable monsters if we just decided to do so. We decide, we press buttons, you all die, and we then have to live with ourselves and think about what it says about us. It’s that last part that restrains us. However, if you fuck with us enough, our self-restraint might slip.